SEX ED FROM CELEBS
Sex & relationships revelations from the stars in 2024
Actor KRISTEN BELL age 44, and her husband, actor
DAX SHEPARD, 49, let their daughters Lincoln, 11, and Delta, 9, roam the Tivoli Gardens theme park in Copenhagen unsupervised for 7 hours. Bell explained:
“Our hotel opened up into the theme park, so we just were kind of like: ‘Are we going to do free-range parenting and roll the dice here?’
Bell and Shepard are very open about their parenting style. Last year Bell said no topic is off limits with her daughters:
‘The word taboo should be stricken from the dictionary. I talk to my kids about drugs and the fact that their daddy is an addict and in recovery’ (referring to Shepard’s battle with substance abuse. He’s been sober for 16+ years).
They often share photos of Lincoln and Delta online but always cover the girls’ faces with emojis”
WORDS Kristen Bell leaves Jimmy Kimmel in disbelief after controversial parenting decision (Hello, 24/9/24)
MORE FROM BELL & SHEPARD…
• Bell says: “There should be no topic that’s off the table for people to talk about. [With my kids] we talk about sex. There are all these ‘hard topics’ that don’t have to be if you give the person on the other end your vulnerability and a little bit of credit”
• Shepard says: “When Kristen describes sex to our children, she says: ‘And then the woman takes the man’s penis and puts it in her vagina.’ So right away it’s like: ‘You’re in charge of this. You will decide to put this in your vagina’, not: ‘The man puts his penis in your vagina.’ That’s a little subtle thing that’s like: ‘You’re in the driver’s seat’”
• [After Lincoln asked why he goes twice a week to AA meetings, Shepard said] “Because I’m an alcoholic and if I don’t go, then I’ll drink and then I’ll be a terrible dad.” [When she asked if she could go with him, he said only alcoholics could attend] “And she goes: ‘I’m gonna be an alcoholic.’ I said: ‘You might. The odds are not in your favour but you’re not there yet.’”
[He & Bell tell their girls] “the whole thing" – such as about his relapse: “Daddy was on pills for his surgery then Daddy was a bad boy and he started getting his own pills”
Comedian JAMES CORDEN, age 46, the former face of Weight Watchers, “resonates” with people who say battling mental health troubles can lead to food addiction, saying…
“‘I tried Ozempic for a bit and then I was like: ‘Nothing about my eating has anything to do with being hungry.’ All it does is make you feel not hungry. But I am very rarely eating [just because I’m hungry].
You are looking at someone who’s eaten a king-size, and when I say king-size Dairy Milk: one you give someone for Christmas – in a car wash.
None of that was: ‘I’m so hungry.’ It’s something else’”
WORDS James Corden’s shocking Ozempic confession after signing Weight Watchers megadeal (Daily Mirror, 26/9/24)
MORE FROM CORDEN
• “I’ve struggled my entire life trying to manage my weight and I suck at it”
• “You cannot forget what most people’s lives are like, how fucking hard it is. And maybe the only slice of joy in your life is that cheeseburger. And it’s cheap. There are no chubby kids at my son’s school because it’s a private school on the West Side of LA”
• “If someone came from another planet and put on the TV, you’d think people who are big or overweight don’t have sex or fall in love. They’re friends of people who fall in love. They’re probably not that bright but they’re a good time”
• [In 2021] “Every year for the past probably 15 years on 1 January I’ve told myself and anyone that would listen: ‘I’ll go on a diet and lose a load of weight. I’m fed up with the way I look and being unhealthy. This is the year I’m doing it.’
Because of that, over Christmas I’ve eaten everything in the fridge because in my head in January I’m starting this diet and it’ll be a success. As you can see, it hasn’t. It’s starting to get me down in a way.
I’ve spent a long time accepting that this is my body. But I really am sick and tired of [it]. I don’t want to wake up tired or feel embarrassed when I’m chasing my son on the soccer field and out of breath after 3 minutes”
• [On Bill Maher’s 2019 fat-shaming comments] “All I could think was: ‘Somebody needs to say something. If only there was someone with a platform who knew what it was actually like to be overweight.’ Then I realised: ‘Oh, that will be me’”
🌈 Actor DANIEL RADCLIFFE, age 35, and Doctor Who’s Jinkx Monsoon were among 30+ celebs who donated time or belongings to an auction that raised $12,000 to send 960 LGBT+ inclusive books to US schoolkids up to age 9…
“Last week Pride And Less Prejudice (PLP) held a virtual auction, Banned Together, featuring a signed and personalised photo from actor Daniel Radcliffe, a book signed by singer Janelle Monáe, a virtual meet-and-greet with trans star Nicole Maines and vinyl signed by rapper Big Freedia. Other contributors were musician Rufus Wainwright, tennis champ Billie Jean King, Heartstopper author Alice Oseman, and comedians Alan Cumming and Hannah Gadsby.
The auction coincided with Banned Books Week, which calls attention to titles challenged worldwide and ‘highlights the value of free and open access to information & brings together the book community – librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers and readers – in support of the freedom to seek and express ideas’.
This year the number of US bans of books containing LGBT+ characters, themes and plots, as well as racial and sexual content, increased.
In 2023 freedom-of-expression charity PEN America recorded 3,362 bans in public-school classrooms and libraries, resulting in students losing access to 1,500+ books by 1,400 authors. Most targeted authors are female, people of colour and/or LGBT+.
The mostly frequently banned titles in 2022-23 were Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, Mike Curato’s Flamer & Tricks by Ellen Hopkins. Works by Margaret Atwood and Juno Dawson were also censored.
‘In 2023 the American Library Association saw a 65% increase in the number of titles targeted for censorship compared with 2022, with a focus on books by and about LGBTQ+ people and people of colour,’ says PLP founder Lisa Forman.
‘We want to ensure that students can access LGBT-inclusive books at school and in their libraries to see themselves & their families represented’”
An After-Auction Sale goes to 6 October – see @PrideAndLesspPejudice on Instagram
WORDS Daniel Radcliffe and Jinkx Monsoon among 30 celebs donating items to fight LGBTQ+ book bans (Pink News, 26/9/24)
🌈 IN MAY 2024 DANIEL RADCLIFFE SAID:
“I will continue to support the rights of all LGBTQ people”
Actor DEMI MOORE, age 61, stars in body horror film The Substance…
“I’ve had my own journey around placing a lot of value, especially when I was younger, on my body and what it looked like. If it wasn’t thin, then I was less valuable.
Our collective consciousness has, for a long time, seen women’s value as diminishing as they age, [with] idealised body types, faces, looks that are more desirable than others.
But we can get to the place of self-love and acceptance, because what other people do or don’t do is irrelevant. How we hold it is everything. That creates our reality.
It’s like you believing that your upper lip was not acceptable, then it made you insecure, but you did something to get to the place where that doesn’t matter”
WORDS How The Substance Encouraged Demi Moore To Shake Off Her Own Body Image Hangups (Collider, 8/9/24)
MORE FROM MOORE
• “One of the biggest misconceptions about me is that I loved my body. So much of it was me calling in projects that would give me an opportunity to help me overcome insecurities about my body.The same with the Vanity Fair covers: it was about trying to free myself from the space of enslavement I’d put myself in”
• “I’ve put myself through the challenges of placing too much value on what my body looked or didn’t look like.With The Substance I was stepping into something that wasn’t about looking good but was about showing parts of myself that perhaps I’d prefer people not see. Like close-up shots of my face, my skin. I intuitively knew there would be an aspect of liberation in my experience. If I could bring that out for others, maybe there’s a chance it could bring a little liberation to them”
• “The film pushed me out of my comfort zone. It tackled the subject of dealing with ageing and that kind of male perspective of the idealised woman that women have many times bought into – but also that battle within ourselves, that intense harsh judgement, that pursuit of perfection that doesn’t exist”
• “The film is really about what we do to ourselves. That violence with what we do with our thoughts, how we attack ourselves and distort things. There’s power in knowing that what we do to ourselves is a choice”
🌈 Writer JACQUELINE WILSON, age 78 and ex-children’s laureate, opened up in 2020 about being in a relationship with a woman…
“‘I’m very touched to be thought of as a gay icon. It’s a delight,’ she now says. Though she can’t see herself ‘rampaging around with a rainbow flag, I highly applaud and approve of anyone who does’.
Wilson’s first adult novel, Think Again, explores same-sex relationships: ‘The characters are hitting 40, when for some, life doesn’t look like what you dreamed of as a teen.
Now many teens are quite depressed and anxious, but they also have big ideas and say: “I want to be this or do that”, which is fantastic, but this story shows you need to have a plan B.
Choice is the best thing in modern life. There’s not just one path. In my generation we were told: get married and have children or have a career. Why can’t you do both?
Getting married young wasn’t a sensible idea for me. Women now work out what they want.’
In 2020 she wrote about LGBT+ issues, with a gay heroine in Love Frankie. ‘[In the past] there would have been far more: “Oh my gosh, Jacqueline has written about someone who’s gay.” Now it’s not a big deal,’ Wilson says. ‘We don’t need to think that everyone is either straight or gay. I’m not suggesting we chop and change all the time, but for my generation it didn’t occur that you could be attracted to all sorts of people.’
Most of her books, some of which explore suicide, mental health and domestic violence, are aimed at kids age 7-12: ‘People say there is sex and drugs in my books, but there isn’t. I wanted to show what life is like for children who are a bit outside the system, feel they don’t belong and are unhappy. These stories would also help other kids understand why those kids might be a bit difficult.
I didn’t have that happy a life as a child. I was brought up on a council estate. In books the children were nothing like me and my friends. Parents never seemed to have any ugly rows, which in my experience they certainly did.
At 12 I wrote in a diary that if I ever wrote children’s books I would put all that in, because it’s very much part of life’”
🌈 WORDS Jacqueline Wilson “delighted to be viewed as gay icon” after coming out (BBC, 9/9/24)
Iconic PRINCESS DIANA opened up to her dance instructor, Anne Allan, about her eating disorder. In the new memoir Dancing With Diana, Allan recalls…
“‘Her head dropped and, unable to look me in the eye, she said: ‘I am so ashamed, Anne, but I need to tell you that I suffer from bulimia.’ Her shame was evidently painful for her.
Diana explained that her bulimia started when she began attending important functions, particularly dinners where she had to sit down to eat. Meeting so many people was terrifying to her and the feeling she was being judged with every move or how she looked or what she said caused her to feel totally inadequate.’
Diana resorted to ‘the cycle of bulimia’ over the years despite growing in confidence.
Allan explained: ‘Understanding the disease was the way forward, I told her and finding ways not to judge herself would come in time.’
Diana first detailed her battle with bulimia while recording tapes for Andrew Morton’s bombshell 1992 biography: ‘The bulimia started the week after we got engaged and would take nearly a decade to overcome.
My husband [Charles] put his hand on my waistline and said: ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ and that triggered off something in me – and the Camilla thing.’
In the 1995 Panorama interview she said: ‘I had bulimia for a number of years. And that’s like a secret disease. You inflict it upon yourself because your self-esteem is at a low ebb and you don’t think you’re worthy or valuable. You fill your stomach up 4 or 5 times a day – some do it more – and it gives you a feeling of comfort. It’s like having a pair of arms around you but it’s temporarily, temporary. Then you’re disgusted at the bloatedness of your stomach and then you bring it all up again.’
Diana didn’t tell the royal family. She said: ‘When you have bulimia you’re very ashamed of yourself and you hate yourself – and people think you’re wasting food – so you don’t discuss it with people. The thing about bulimia is your weight always stays the same, whereas with anorexia you visibly shrink. So you can pretend the whole way through. There’s no proof’”
WORDS Princess Diana Once Confessed Her Bulimia Struggles to Ballet Teacher, Book Claims (US Weekly, 4/9/24)
Actor ASHTON KUTCHER age 46 – and who with actor Mila Kunis, age 41, has a daughter Wyatt, 9, and son Dimitri, 7 – theorises that his “experiences with toxic masculinity in the past led him to treat his kids differently”, saying…
“I don’t know if it equates to being a girl dad or it equates to her being my first, but when I had my daughter, I had never been so in love in my entire life. Mila and I talked about it a lot. Like, I’ve never loved anyone this much. Ever.
With my daughter, I just want to protect her.
When my son cries, I’m like: ‘All right, what did we learn? Let’s move on.’
But when my daughter cries, my heart is out of my body and I can’t put it back in.
My son, I’m always like: ‘Yeah, let’s go for it.’ Yesterday we’re popping wheelies on a bicycle in the driveway. Or it’s like: ‘See if you can jump down four stairs.’
I also notice the same thing with my wife – she’s very strict on our daughter and, like, a gushball with our son. I think we balance each other in that way”
WORDS Ashton Kutcher admits “toxic masculinity” has impacted his parenting with wife Mila Kunis (Metro, 6/9/24)
MORE FROM KUTCHER & KUNIS
• [About the 2023 romcom Your Place Or Mine] “So here’s the crazy thing: before we shot the sequence where I was 20, I was like: ‘I didn’t have this much chest hair when I was 20. I actually need to mow this thing down a little bit and clean it up.’ And doing sit-ups, I’m like: ‘God, I used to have abs when I was 20 – what happened?’”
• [About giving kids a bath] ”Here’s the thing. If you can see the dirt on them, clean them. Otherwise, there’s no point”
“[I wash my] armpits and my crotch daily and nothing else ever and throw some water on my face after a workout to get all the salts out”
Kunis says: “I don’t wash my body with soap every day. But I wash pits & tits and holes & soles”
Actor NICOLE KIDMAN, age 57, stars in erotic drama Babygirl, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival…
ON FILMING SEX SCENES
Kidman says: “It left me ragged. I was like: ‘I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to do this anymore.’ At the same time I was compelled to do it. [Director Halina Reijn] would hold me and I’d hold her because it was just very confronting to me.
I felt very exposed as an actor, as a woman, as a human being. I had to go in and go out, like: ‘I need to put my protection back on. What have I just done? Where did I go? What did I do?’
I hope this is a very liberating story. It’s told by a woman through her gaze. It’s obviously about sex; it’s about desire, your inner thoughts, secrets, marriage. It’s about truth, power, consent.
What made it unique was that I was in the hands of a woman with this material. It was very deep to share those things and very freeing. I didn’t feel exploited”
THE ORGASM GAP
“The film kicks off with Kidman having sex with her husband, who climaxes, leaving her wanting. She ducks off to another room and masturbates to porn.
The orgasm gap – the phenomenon of 95% of straight men vs 65% of straight women usually or always orgasming with a partner – is ‘huuuuuge’, says Reijn. ‘Take note, men’”
LONGEST SEX SCENE IN KIDMAN’S CAREER
“From Eyes Wide Shut to Big Little Lies, Kidman is fearless about intimacy and vulnerability. The Daily Beast said: ‘The sex is steamy and kinky but also funny and clumsy – precisely what it might look like for 2 people exploring each other’s boundaries without that inauthentic Hollywood sheen.’
Reijn wanted the sex scenes to feel realistic: ‘In movies you still often see a woman have an orgasm that is anatomically not possible.’The film erotically explores the intersections of power, gender, age, dominance and submission: ‘They try to play fun roles that can be scary and embarrassing. It’s hot because it’s not just a perfect end result.
I wanted to create a male character who’s experimenting and confused by: ‘Who am I supposed to be as a man? What is masculinity and how do I ask for consent if I’m being asked to be a dominator?’”
WORDS Nicole Kidman Tackles The Orgasm Gap In Her Latest Film, Babygirl (Marie Claire, 4/9/24)
Musician JORDAN STEPHENS, age 32, author of Avoidance, Drugs, Heartbreak And Dogs, wrote the 2017 Guardian article “Toxic masculinity is everywhere. It’s up to us men to fix this”…
“Since then Stephens has become something of a leading voice on modern masculinity in the UK.
He says: ‘In my experience men can go a long time avoiding shit because we’ve glamourised how to do that. Glamourised drinking and drug culture. And society isn’t set up in a way that men need to really grow up to be successful.
I believe pain is stored in the body. If anybody avoids it, suppresses it, it will come out.
We are perpetually shown what I would like to believe is a smaller percentage of men who are doing awful shit constantly. That seems to be the priority of a news cycle – that’s the nature of negative bias.
There isn’t enough paternal energy out there.
I want boys, especially going into their teens, to start building up a resilient concept of self-love. Not an overcompensating, power-abusing makeshift form – I mean an understanding of their energy, their body.
That’s the first step to start talking about the real issues like consent and domestic violence.
We are half woman – we’re genetically half our mothers. I worry that there’s not that understanding of that part of ourselves we’re totally disconnected from. Self-love for boys – that would really change the way we look at things. There are so many incredible boys and men. Wouldn’t it be lovely for us to focus on their achievements?’”
WORDS Rizzle Kicks’ Jordan Stephens: I changed into a “more loving” person after cheating (Irish News, 20/8/24)
MORE FROM STEPHENS
“We need balance. And half of that is light. Sunshine. Warmth. Connection. All around me I see wonderful examples. Men stepping up as fathers in the absence of their own. Men who lift boulders & live peacefully in the woods. Men who run into burning buildings. Talk people off ledges. Fix the Wi-fi. Clear the rubbish. Go down sewers. Donate to their community. Grieve publicly. I’ve seen videos of men pulling children from rubble more often than I’d like.
I want to uplift men who uplift women. Men who want to make a difference. Men who feel beautiful”
🌈 Actor DANIEL CRAIG, age 56 – who stars in Queer with Drew Starkey, age 30 – says…
“If I wasn’t in this movie and I saw it, I’d want to be in it. It’s the kind of film I want to see, I want to make, I want to be out there.
There’s nothing intimate about filming a sex scene. We just wanted to make it as touching, real and natural as we possibly could. Drew is a wonderful, fantastic, beautiful actor to work with and we kind of had a laugh. We tried to make it fun.”
Starkey said: “When you’re rolling around on the floor the second day it’s a good way to get to know someone.”
Craig called Queer, an autobiographical novel by William Burroughs, a “tiny book with an emotional thump. It’s about love, loss, loneliness, yearning. If I was writing myself a part and trying to tick off things I wanted to do, this would be all of them.”
Director Luca Guadagnino said Craig is one of “very few iconic actors who allow their fragility to be seen”
🌈 WORDS “There’s nothing intimate about filming a sex scene”: Daniel Craig opens up about new film Queer (Guardian, 3/9/24)
PLUS…
• On whether the sometimes explicit sex scenes will make headlines, Craig says: “I don’t think about it. What’s the point? I can’t control it”
• On doing a sex scene Starkey says: “You treat it like you would any other thing. Obviously you’re more precious with it and communicate more about people’s comfort levels. Daniel and I were game for anything. We were like: ‘Let’s go for it, let’s have fun.’ Those were some of the most fun days we all had on set, just Daniel and I laughing”
On doing post-production ADR (automated dialogue replacement) for sex scenes: “It’s exertion ad breaths and groans. Just you in a booth alone doing that, you feel like you’re in an insane asylum.
Craig is absolutely fucking incredible in the film. He’s shattering, very vulnerable. The most punk person. He’s like: ‘Who cares what anyone thinks?’”
“There’s constant discussion about whether [my character is] queer. Playing that ambiguity was the fun part”
• Guadagnino says: “Daniel has been so beautifully naked in terms of the soul in this movie that this will be the thing people connect with no matter how naked he is on the screen”
Actor GILLIAN ANDERSON, age 56, writes in the book Want – a collection of women’s anonymous sexual fantasies (including one of her own)…
“I don’t know if my computer-analyst mother owned Nancy Friday’s 1973 book My Secret Garden. Ours certainly wasn’t a puritanical household where such reading matter would have been frowned upon – but as liberal as my childhood was, it wouldn’t have been something Mom left lying about.
When I was a teenager, I found Story Of O, the erotic novel by Anne Desclos, tucked behind a sofa cushion in our neighbours’ house. I definitely turned a few pages.
As a young child I remember wandering into a living room where the TV was left on and standing paralysed in fascination as the onscreen couple engaged in quite chaste but clearly illicit activities. I still recall my red-hot cheeks, quickened heartbeat and palpable rising shame.
I am a woman with a sex life and fantasies of my own, and I was curious to know the ways in which a diverse group of other women’s fantasies were similar to or different from mine. The replies made me consider my identity: the labels of actor, mother, partner, activist, American/British woman.
I’ve always been intrigued by sexual fantasies. I want to remove the taboo and bring in the thrill and fun in the hope that this book, through disclosure, representation and identification, might inspire
I submitted my own letter to the book. I was curious: would it blend in and – though we will never know! – match people’s assumptions about me?
Sex has felt like something that adapts and changes as I grow and change. A huge part of this has always been in the thinking and feeling, not just the doing.
As an actor the women I’ve embodied have inner lives, desires and fantasies which are vital to understand what makes them tick. And a fair few of them have taught me about sex and sexuality.
I was terrified of putting my fantasy down on paper lest someone discern which was mine. There are 2 sides to me: one that is good at asking for what I want and one that will concede to my partner’s desires, that is happy to share my innermost urges but only if my partner starts the conversation.
[With our] fantasies, we control the action, who does what to whom and how. We can choose to do whatever we want, with whomever we want, however many people we want, whenever we want – without fear, without societal judgment or consequence. Fantasy can help crystallise our wants and needs. It can free us to explore ourselves, to experiment with our arousal and our desire without risk or harm or criticism. We can let ourselves go, be our best, sexiest, hottest selves and stop worrying about the ‘perfect’ body.
You have no idea how much joy it gives me to imagine all of you beautiful women across the world, sitting down at your devices and typing away, articulating your sexual dreams and pouring your deepest wants, desires and secrets onto the page. I am thrilled that so many of you are embracing your eroticism and, in the process, having a bloody good time.
I hope this book will start a new conversation about sexual power, particularly for women. All of us have the power to say – and get – what we really, really WANT”
WORDS Introduction to Want – Submitted by anonymous. Collected by Gillian Anderson (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Actor WINONA RYDER, age 52, on being sexually harassed in her late 20s…
“‘I had a couple of difficult experiences with a couple of people who were just blatantly sexually harassing me. It happened again in my 30s. It wasn’t an assault. But it was incredibly inappropriate. It was wild.
I really understand [what victims of Harvey Weinstein and others went through]. I was lucky because I was known, so it didn’t happen as much as maybe it would if I’d been a struggling actor.
But I remember how you’re negotiating, thinking about what’s going to happen if you say something. You’re working it out while this person is being extremely creepy.
[Telling fellow Beetlejuice Beetlejuice actor Jenna Ortega, age 21, about all of this] I was like: Jesus Christ, that’s really fucked up.’
She became used to brushing off men’s unwanted attentions: ‘If someone was being inappropriate or drunkenly hitting on me it was like: ‘Ha ha!’ Inappropriate? I dealt with that. But touching me? It felt very invasive.
In retrospect, it really soured [her on making movies]. All the great actors always told me: “When it stops being amazing, you gotta get out.” I took that to heart.
There was a period when I was not in season. It was like 10, 12, 15 years and it did coincide with everything that happened [in her life, such as being convicted at age 30 for shoplifting].
But also if you look at 2000 to 2010: wow! It was the most degrading time to be a woman [in entertainment]. Even the cool people were participating in what felt like should be off limits.’
Famous young women became prey to an aggressive online media. The tone was punitive.
‘I remember being really scared. It felt like there was a shift in the industry and the culture about what became acceptable and rewarded.’
She talks about the period’s boorish gross-out comedies and the lionising of the men who starred in them: ‘Actresses were being punished for not getting the joke or not playing along. Everyone was trying to be the cool girl – sexualised but also one of the guys. I thought it was demeaning. I remember feeling like: ‘Man, if this is the future, we’re fucked’”
WORDS Winona Ryder’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (Esquire, 29/8/24)
Expat PRINCE HARRY, age 39, and MEGHAN MARKLE, 43 – parents to Lilibet, 3, and Archie, 5 – launched the Parents’ Network to support families of kids affected by online harm. Harry said of parents helping their child…
“If you know HOW to help. We’ve got to the stage where almost every parent needs to be a first responder. And even the best first responders in the world wouldn’t be able to tell the signs of possible suicide. Like, that is the terrifying piece of this.
One of the scariest things we’ve learned over the last 16, 17 years that social media’s been around is that it could happen to absolutely anybody.
In the olden days if your kids were under your roof, you knew what they were up to – at least they were safe, right? Now they could be in the next-door room on a tablet or a phone and can be going down these rabbit holes. And before you know it, within 24 hours they could be taking their life.”
Meghan said: “Look at it through the lens of: ‘What if it was my daughter, my son? My son or daughter who comes home, who are joyful, who I love and one day right under my roof our entire lives change because of something that was completely out of our control.’
All you want to do as parents is protect your kids. As we can see what’s happening in the online space, we know there’s a lot of work to be done.
[On telling Oprah Winfrey in 2021 ‘I just didn’t want to be alive anymore’] When you’ve been through any level of pain or trauma, part of our healing journey – certainly part of mine – is being able to be really open about it. I haven’t really scraped the surface on my experience. But I’d never want someone to feel that way, to be making those sort of plans and not to be believed.
So if me voicing what I’ve overcome will save someone, or encourage someone in their life to really genuinely check in on them, then that’s worth it. I’ll take a hit for that”
WORDS Prince Harry and Meghan Markle launch Parents’ Network to address the dangers of online harm (CBS News, 4/8/24)
MORE FROM MARKLE
“When I met Kate [Middleton] I was in ripped jeans. I was barefoot. Like, I was a hugger. I have always been a hugger. I didn’t realise that’s really jarring for a lot of Brits.
I started to understand that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside, that there is a forward-facing way of being, then you close the door and think: ‘We can relax now’”
Ex-model & TV chef PADMA LAKSHMI, age 53, posted about shooting for the Pirelli calendar…
“‘Modelling in the 90s I wondered what it would be like to be photographed for it. I finally got to tick off a major bucket list item for the 25-year-old me. Better late than never!!!
Thank you to the amazing glam team for making me feel not only safe and cared for but also beautiful, womanly and totally at home in my own skin.
I’m glad I waited until now to do it because I appreciate it so much more.
Ladies, don’t let anyone ever tell you it’s too late. Your best life and work could just be ahead of you.’
Recently Lakshmi said about her Bare Necessities lingerie campaign: ‘I’m more confident now, physically and otherwise. I would never go back to my 20s, even if it meant I had a body that was more fit and skinny and tight and high in all the right places. You know, I look OK now!’”
WORDS Padma Lakshmi strips down for glamorous Pirelli Calendar shoot: “Totally at home in my own skin” (Page Six, 16/8/24)
MORE FROM LAKSHMI
• [On her daughter Krishna Thea Lakshmi-Dell, age 14] “When she went to preschool, I said: ‘If anybody touches you, makes you feel uncomfortable or makes you touch them, just say “no” really loud.’ Most of us are so unaware that we’re kind of shocked that it’s happening to us. I always tried to give her the language to defend herself so she’s got 2 or 3 sentences in her pocket”
• “This year my weight will not be my focus. If I need a bigger dress, so be it. Any day on the red carpet isn't nearly as important as ensuring my daughter doesn’t measure her worth by her dress size”
• “We are so afraid of everything that’s not exactly fitting a very narrow parameter of what we think is attractive and acceptable. The sexual politics of that are very complicated”
• [On having been raped at 16 and being diagnosed with endometriosis in 2006] “Nobody wants to stand in front of a room and talk about their vagina. But I was so angry about what had happened to me”
• “I’d rather have this body with my accomplishments than have the beautiful body I did in my 20s without any accomplishments”
• “I try to be kind to my body and compare myself to myself, not to other people”
• “I don’t want to look like a 23-year-old – I want to look like the best version of me”
• “The things I used to worry about when I was 20 – I wish that younger me had given herself a break”
Minnesota governor TIM WALZ, age 60 – father of Hope, 23, and Gus, 17 – whose X description starts: “Dad, husband”, who as a high-school football coach was an LGBT+ ally and who is outspoken about his experience with IVF (unusual for a man!), says of his son…
“‘Gus was different from his classmates. He preferred video games and spending more time by himself. When he was becoming a teenager, we learned that Gus has a non-verbal learning disorder in addition to an anxiety disorder and ADHD – conditions millions of Americans have.
Gus’s condition is not a setback – it’s his secret power.’
On social media, Walz applauds his children’s achievements. He and his wife Gwen say: ‘Gus is brilliant, hyper-aware of details that many of us pass by’”
WORDS Tim and Gwen Walz Speak on Son Gus’ Learning Disorder: “His Secret Power” (People, 7/8/24)
MORE FROM WALZ
• “Even if you’ve never gone through the hell of infertility, someone you know has. When Gwen and I were having trouble getting pregnant, the anxiety and frustration blotted out the sun. We have 2 beautiful children because of reproductive healthcare like IVF”
• “This gets personal for me and my family. My wife and I spent years going through infertility treatments. I remember the pit in my stomach when the phone rang and the agony when we heard the treatments hadn’t worked”
• “It’s not by chance that we named our daughter Hope”
• [On Republicans dubbing Walz #TamponTim because he removed the tampon tax in Minnesota and joined 27 other states in requiring free period products in school bathrooms – a body-positive move that makes having a period easier, combats period poverty, helps those who might be caught out menstruating at a young age and minimises stress for trans kids – Bloomberg’s Lisa Jarvis asks]
“Why does having period products in boys’ bathrooms strike some as such a threat? Surely many boys already see these products in the bathroom at home.
With their Tampon Tim nickname, Republicans pointed to a very real problem faced by young people.
Policymakers should be thinking about ways to make adolescence healthier and happier. That includes normalising and easing the body transitions all kids experience”
Actor ROMOLA GARAI, age 42, mum of 2 and a Harvey Weinstein denouncer, said in presenting a 2013 Bafta award: “I had the misfortune of having 23 stitches in my vagina. So I didn’t think I’d be laughing at anything for a long time” and of starring in the faint-inducing play The Years…
“It is difficult, as a woman, to understand your body as belonging completely to yourself. As a young woman,
I thought my body was the property of the society I lived in. I didn’t really understand that it belonged to me and I could dictate its size and shape, what went into it & out of it – food and sex and all of it. And I don’t know that women feel any better now”
WORDS London play pauses after graphic abortion scene leaves theatregoers feeling faint (Independent, 1/8/24)
MORE FROM GARAI
• “I had 2 huge babies, tore both times”
• “When I was younger, I found it extremely difficult that you’re trading in your body a lot as a woman”
• [At 17, starring in Dirty Dancing 2, she was given a dietician to make sure she stayed underweight and a female producer said about her thighs when Garai was in her underwear: “This isn’t good enough”] ”It screwed me up for years. It completely changed how I felt about my body. I felt I’d failed since I hadn’t fought back. I signed off on Photoshopped images and felt terrible for perpetrating this lie”
• “Women always find a way to punish themselves. It’s not inbuilt – it’s from a society that teaches you from birth that you are not the norm and you must always strive for a perfection you will never obtain. Of course we internalise this shame.
I hope that when my kids are grown, social media will have died out. Women have always been enslaved to their image, but that’s exploded into this terrible atom bomb. So a generation of women is being brought up with endless compulsive viewing of themselves”
• “How many interviews ask: ‘Has becoming a father affected your career?’ It’s like: ‘Congratulations – you fucked someone’”
• “Many actresses are happy to be on a diet for the rest of their lives. The weight thing is a metaphor for control – making women feel weak because they’re so insecure so they won’t disagree with the director. Women are afraid of being fat or ageing”
🌈 Trans college student VIVIAN JENNA WILSON, age 20, is estranged from her dad, businessman Elon Musk…
“On social media and in an interview Musk, age 53, said Wilson was ‘not a girl’, saying he’d been ‘tricked’ into authorising her trans-related medical treatment.
Wilson said: ‘I think he was under the assumption that I would just let this go unchallenged. If you’re going to lie about me blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.’
Wilson came out as gay in 8th grade [ages 13-14] and as trans at 16, when she wanted to start treatment for severe gender dysphoria.
Musk harassed her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressured her to appear more masculine. ‘I was in 4th grade [ages 9-10],’ she says. ‘On one road trip he was constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high. It was cruel. He was cold. He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.’
At 18 she sought court approval to change her name, saying in the filing: ‘I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.’
She says: ‘I’d like to emphasise one thing: I am an adult. I am 20. My life should be defined by my own choices.’
Last week, in a talk with conservative commentator Jordan Peterson streamed live on X, Musk said: ‘I lost my son, essentially.’ He used Wilson’s birth name, known by trans people as a deadname, saying she was ‘dead, killed by the woke mind virus’.
On X he posted that Wilson was ‘born gay and slightly autistic’ and at 4 she fit certain gay stereotypes like loving musicals and saying: ‘Fabulous!’ about clothes.
Wilson posted: ‘He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he simply wasn’t there. In the little time that he was, I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.’
Musk is waging a campaign against trans people. He told Peterson that Wilson’s gender transition motivated his push into conservative politics: ‘I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.’
Wilson says about Musk: ‘It was clear that we had a very distinct disdain for each other’”
🌈 WORDS Elon Musk’s transgender daughter, in first interview, says he berated her for being queer as a child (NBC News, 26/7/24)
🌈 Racing driver DAVID SCHUMACHER, age 22, congratulated his dad – ex-Formula One driver Ralf, 49 – on coming out…
“David Schumacher came out in full support of his father, posting on Insta: ‘I am very happy that you have finally found someone with whom you really feel that you feel very comfortable and secure, no matter if you are a man or a woman, I’m 100% behind you dad and wish you all the best and congratulations 🍀 😇 ‘
His dad revealed his same-sex relationship to the world in a surprise social media post last weekend. A 6-time grand prix winner and brother of 7-time world champion Michael, Ralf Schumacher came out as gay and shared an image of himself embracing his business manager, Etienne.
He wrote: ‘The most beautiful thing in life is when you have the right partner by your side with whom you can share everything.’
News of Ralf’s same-sex relationship comes almost a decade after he split from ex-wife & David’s mum Cora Brinkman, who had a racing career of her own.
David grew up go-karting with Michael Schumacher’s son Mick.
But while Ralf maintains a close relationship with David, often attending his races, where they’re pictured smiling together, David and his mum have had little to no contact since 2022.
It is not clear exactly when Ralf and his business manager-turned-romantic partner Etienne’s relationship crossed from professional to personal.German actor Carmen Geiss, 59, said about their loving relationship: ‘It’s finally out. It’s just wonderful that the 2 of them are now living out their love.’
Responding to Ralf’s post, she wrote: ‘After 2 years you can finally show your love to the world. I’ve known Ralf for more than 25 years. He’s always been a great joy to me. Always liberal, a good-hearted person I can call day and night. He has always been honest with me in his position. I am happy that I got to be a part of this love and even more happy for the 2 who searched and found each other’”
🌈 WORDS Ralf Schumacher’s son congratulates his father for his happiness in gay relationship and says “I’m very happy you’ve finally found someone with whom you feel comfortable” – nine years after divorcing his mother Cora (Daily Mail, 15/7/24)
Actor VIGGO MORTENSEN – age 65 and dad of Henry, age 36 – recently directed, wrote and starred in a “feminist western”…
“The Dead Don’t Hurt was loosely inspired by Mortensen’s mother Grace, who raised him from age 11. He had an image in his mind of her as a ‘strong-willed, independent little girl with lots of imagination’. This film examines who that girl might have grown into if she lived ‘in a time and place dominated by a few unscrupulous men. I was just curious what happens to the little girls and women when their partners or dads go away to fight their masculine wars.
Every war is a mistake. Because the result is destruction, tragedy and untold lives affected for generations.’
The most extreme moments of the film are only implied. An act of violence is inflicted on a main character, Vivienne. We see only the aftermath: her sitting on her bed with an expression of devastation, rage and vulnerability.
‘What you imagine is much more terrible than anything I could have filmed,’ he says.
She is ‘the strongest person in the movie’ – which may be why some people call it a feminist western.
Mortensen says: ‘I haven’t defined it that way. It’s too simplistic. One review said it was fake feminism – that I was trying to come off as a saviour of women, it was half-assed and I didn’t go all the way. I never thought: “We’re writing a feminist story.”’
He leans his famously dimpled chin on his hand, exposing the small H tattoo on his wrist (a tribute to Henry, who scribbled his initial on his dad’s arm when learning to write) and says: ‘Just because you’re a man you’re not disqualified from telling a woman’s story’”
WORDS Viggo Mortensen: “I’m not a fake feminist. I don’t even know what that means” (iNews, 19/7/24)
MORE FROM MORTENSEN
• “My mother was curious about other people and other cultures. She read stories to me, told me stories like [many] moms do, took me to movies when I was very young. Her whole life we’d go to movies and always talk story”
• “The film is about a woman creating new frontiers just by being herself.
The idea of feminine/masculine is complex – more so these days. People talk about it more openly. A man can be very feminine and a woman more masculine in their approach to a problem or discussion”
Actor JEFF GOLDBLUM, age 71 and dad to sons Charlie Ocean, 8, and River Joe, 7, on having kids…
“‘You don’t want to mess it up. So far it’s been delicious, enlarging and sobering. A good lighthouse – they help you find your way. They’re a guide of sorts.
They say the whole oak tree is in the acorn. It’s all in there. Somehow.’
The background image on Goldblum’s phone shows his sons about to attack him with pillows. He’s smiling and shielding his groin: ‘You have to protect yourself at all times!’
Growing up in Pennsylvania without many other Jews around ‘it was a case of: “Find me a respite from the provincial difficulties I’m having in my neighbourhood and school!”
Self-examination? I’m ripe for it. It was part of the attraction of acting.’
Sometimes he runs out of patience with his sons and is frustrated about it: ‘They are primal. They’re experiencing raw, unexpurgated life. And in proximity to it, things come up in me more readily and fully. Including temper.’
Goldblum tries to get the balance right between guiding them and backing off, what he calls ‘the dance’. He says kids note everything about you ‘with absorptive, fresh and ready eyes. They see you. And whether you like it or not, you’re imprinting how they form and what they think life is.
’How does he talk to his boys about their behaviour as men? ‘Masculinity overlaps into good humanity – which is an ethical morality, kindness, a loving navigation through the world.’ He prefers to ask his sons: ‘How do you be a good person?’
He says to them: ‘I don’t want to step on your spirit, suppress you or hog-tie you.Don’t hurt each other. Take care of yourselves. Have regard for the gift of your own human life. Have respect for the lives of others. Tell the truth.’
Goldblum adds: ‘I hope I’m around when they graduate high school. Et cetera’”
WORDS “It’s foolish to mask your age. Accept it. Present it”: Jeff Goldblum on vanity, mortality and becoming a father in his 60s (Guardian, 3/8/24)
MORE FROM GOLDBLUM
• [On being an older dad] “It’s revivifying, challenging, sometimes maddening and volatile. They can be like feral creatures unleashed.
Oh yeah, and sweet and amazing”
“I’m glad I waited. All the things I’m considering are perfectly suited to the big questions and challenges of having kids and what you want to expose them to and leave them with, what life is and what kind of life you contribute to them”
• [On what he’ll tell his sons about not leaving them his $40 million fortune] “‘You’ve got to row your own boat.’ It’s an important thing to teach kids. I’m not going to do it for you. And you’re not going to want me to do it for you”
Actor DAISY RIDLEY, age 32, Star Wars and Young Woman And The Sea star…
“I was doing something physical the same way a male character was. One of the stunt team came over to pat the man on the back. I said: ‘Are you not gonna do the high fives and all the stuff to me?’
It happened again and again. It’s behaviour that’s learned – they were doing the ‘the male thing’ they’re comfortable doing, and that didn’t include me.
It’s deeply uncomfortable to speak up. Then it takes a lot of bravery for the other person to say: ‘I’m really sorry. I did not realise I was doing that. I see you both in the same way.’ The person couldn’t do that. Maybe on the next job.
Small acts of courage do something. I try to keep my side of the street clean and advocate for the next person that’s going to be in that situation”
WORDS Daisy Ridley opens up about her experiences of sexism on film sets and how it can still feel “deeply uncomfortable” to confront it (DailyMail, 11/6/24)
MORE FROM RIDLEY
• “At the Last Jedi premiere I was so skinny and my skin was terrible. I got tests done and it turned out my body was taking in no nutrients. I was like a little skeleton and just so tired. I was becoming a ghost”
“I have an issue with the word tomboy. Why has there got to be a ‘boy’ in it? You’re saying a girl is actually like a boy because she likes to be active?I have strong masculine energy as well as feminine”
• [At 23, about a post of her in Star Wars captioned: “I can’t believe the unrealistic expectations I’m setting for young girls. Who cast me anyway? Don’t they know real women have curves?”, she wrote] “‘Real women’ are all shapes and sizes, all ethnicities, all levels of brave, have families, don’t have families. I am a ‘real woman’ like every other woman in this world. I will not apologise for how I look, what I say, how I live”
• [At 24 she posted] “At 15 I was diagnosed with endometriosis. Found out I have polycycstic ovaries and that’s why [my skin is] bad. Feeling so self conscious has left my confidence in tatters. I hate wearing makeup but I don’t want to leave the house without it on. We only have one body, let us all make sure ours [are] working in tiptop condition”
Actor ZOSIA MAMET, age 36, star of Girls, in 2014 wrote in Glamour about being hospitalised at 17 for an eating disorder…
“Hollywood is triggering. It’s harder to tease out reality from [body] dysmorphia when you live in a world that kind of values dysmorphia.
I was a bit of a chubby kid. [My mum, actor Lindsay Crouse] was always on a diet and everything I was fed was nonfat or sugar free. When I was hungry, her response was: ‘Are you sure?’
[On giving a talk in 2017 about having pelvic floor dysfunction] I’m a pretty private human in my daily life. But I’ve always enjoyed sharing.
If writing about my life in a really personal, open way can make someone feel less alone and help them through a struggle, or make them see their own experience in mine, it will be worth it”
WORDS Zosia Mamet on Girls, acclaim and nepo babies: “It’s not like you’re born to a famous family and the red carpet rolls out for you” (Guardian, 24/7/24)
MORE FROM MAMET
“With my eating disorder I’m an addict in recovery.
It’s a rarity to find a woman without body issues – not a full-fledged disorder, perhaps, but a skewed view of her body, a dislike of her shape, a desire to be thinner, bustier, taller, different. So many women look in the mirror and attack what they see.
I was told I was fat at age 8. Ever since then, a monster in my brain tells me I’m fat and convinces me my clothes don’t fit or I ate too much. It forced me to starve myself, run extra miles, abuse my body. As a teen I used to stand at the fridge at night debilitated by the war raging inside me: to give into hunger or go back to bed. I’d stand there for hours taking out a piece of food then putting it back; taking it out, putting it in my mouth then spitting it into the garbage.
I was only 17, living in misery, waiting to die. My dad [playwright David Mamet] got me into treatment, saying: ‘You’re not allowed to die.’
These diseases are about control of your life and your body”
• “I’ve struggled with body image for as long as I can remember. Sometimes my thoughts are so loud I can barely hear anything else. Anyone who has had eating issues knows those noises never fully go away.
About my mom’s influence: I AM NOT BLAMING MY MOTHER FOR MY EATING DISORDER. I empathise. Her treatment of me stemmed from her issues with her body. She struggled, so I struggled”
🌈 Diver TOM DALEY, age 30 – and dad of sons Robert Ray, 6, and Phoenix Rose, 1, born by surrogate to him and his husband Dustin Lance Black, 50 – says: “For me, the Olympic gold medal this time is having my kids there to watch”…
“At a US Olympic museum, a video about what it means to be an Olympian reduced Daley to tears.
He says his son asked: ‘“What’s the matter, Papa?” I just said:
“I miss diving and I miss the Olympics.” And Lance looked at me like: “Oh no… “‘
When Robbie said he wanted to see his dad dive at an Olympics, ‘that was that’”
WORDS Tom Daley fired up by “gold medal” feeling of his children cheering him on (Guardian, 17/7/24)
🌈 MORE FROM DALEY
• “Now Robbie is like my pushy parent”
• “I reacted to having horrible examples of fatherhood in my life by becoming, I think, a really good dad. It’s the project I’m most proud of”
• “It’s so special to have a little buddy you can take with you to do things and see things through a new set of eyes”
• “Daley wrote a children’s book, Jack Splash, about a 10-year-old who doesn’t quite fit in, joins a diving team and faces bullies: ‘As a kid being part of a diving team, and at school, I didn’t have the best time. In the book I was trying to emphasise the importance of kindness, teamwork, positivity – that it’s about the relationships, friendships, the journey.
When you become a parent you realise that [kids] are the most important things in your life. You do a lot of things to change and shift the way you think. I knew I was going home to a family that loves and cares for me no matter how well I perform.
I can’t imagine seeing my kids go through any feelings of shame and discrimination and just feeling like you’re on the outside like you do when you grow up as an LGBTQ+ person. You want your kids to grow up and just be happy.
When I was a kid, there wasn’t really anyone to look up to, like an out sports person who was still competing.
It can be a terrifying space to go into sport as an LGBT+ person because you want to fit in but there’s something about you that’s slightly different.“Will you be accepted if you come out and are 100% yourself?” you are always asking yourself. It’s a very heavy burden’”
Sex therapist DR RUTH WESTHEIMER, who died on 12 July at age 96, was “a pop icon through her frank talk about taboo bedroom topics”…
“In 2002 Dr Ruth told high-school kids: ‘I hold old-fashioned values and I’m a bit of a square. Sex is a private art and a private matter. But still, it is a subject we must talk about.’
Westheimer encouraged open dialogue on once-closeted issues that affected her audience of millions.
Her recurring theme: there is nothing to be ashamed of.
She normalised the use of words like vagina and penis on radio and TV, aided by her giggly Jewish-grandmotherly accent and her 4ft 7in frame – both made her an unlikely outlet for ‘sexual literacy’ but were key to her success.
Her humorous, nonjudgmental manner catapulted her radio show, Sexually Speaking, into the spotlight in the 1980s.
Westheimer wrote 40+ books demystifying sex with rationality and humour and made People magazine’s Most Intriguing People Of The Century list.
Her rise coincided with the early days of Aids, when frank sexual talk became a necessity. She stood up for gay men, spoke out loudly for the LGBT+ community, defended abortion rights and was an outspoken advocate of condoms.
She told Johnny Carson: ‘If we could [talk] about sexual activity the way we talk about diet, without it having this connotation that there’s something not right about it, we would be a step further’”
WORDS Dr Ruth Westheimer dead at 96: Sex therapist who became pop icon, media star and best-selling author passes away at her NYC home (Daily Mail, 13/7/24)
WISDOM FROM DR RUTH
• “It’s vitally important to make sure your children are sexually literate. Make sure your boys know about nocturnal emissions – wet dreams – and that girls and boys know about menstruation. Children will not necessarily want to talk with their parents about sex. I advise parents to leave a book on the coffee table. If your child has questions, make yourself available but don’t pry”
• “My introduction to sex was The Ideal Marriage. My parents had hidden it in a bookcase. I didn’t know I’d end up working in family planning or make 450 TV programmes talking about sex”
• “I’m not a sex symbol, at least in the conventional sense”
• “When it comes to sex, the most important 6 inches are the ones between the ears”
🌈 Actor EMMA CORRIN, age 28 & nonbinary star of The Crown, showed underarm hair on a recent Harper’s Bazaar cover…
“Reactions included: ‘Shave please – it’s not about human’s rights, it’s about self-hygiene.’ Others pointed out the double standard and were confused as to why people were so pressed about Corrin showing off their underarm fuzz: ‘Can’t wait for everyone who’s going to be upset by the hair that naturally grows in everyone’s armpits.’
Another reaction: ‘Men with hairy armpits telling women to shave theirs because of hygiene: the irony.’ And: ‘So women are “unhygienic” if they don’t shave but no one would bat an eye if it were a man?’
Chimed in one more: ‘Blows my mind to see people losing theirs over body hair. All the horrific things going on in the world and you’re concerned about someone’s shaving preferences.’
Corrin said: ‘People follow me because they’ve watched something I’m in. They think I’m one kind of person and then they’ll see who I actually am and how I present and…’ trailing off: ‘I will never understand why. Who are you hurting by being yourself? Why am I controversial?’
The answer, according to Corrin, is ‘fear. Absolute fear.’
The only thing we’re scared of is missing Corrin as the supervillain in Deadpool & Wolverine”
WORDS Emma Corrin divides social media by showing off armpit hair on Harper’s Bazaar cover (Page Six, 23/5/24)
🌈 MORE FROM CORRIN
• [On going to an all-girls’ boarding school] “I went to a dance and someone thought I was a boy and asked me to dance. It became a big joke in my class. Since then I started conforming. I grew out my hair and rolled up my skirt”
• [On coming out as LGBT+ in 2021 by posting a photo on Instagram of themselves in a wedding dress captioned ‘ur fave queer bride’, changing pronouns and posting photos of themselves in a chest binder] “The vitriol is worse than I anticipated. Even though we like to think we’re in a progressive society, a lot of what we’re seeing is increasingly a step back”
“It took me aback how much hate I got. It was quite a reality check. But for a lot of people, it did help. Especially around conversation of gender and stuff, it does help a lot of people to see someone living as a nonbinary person in the world. I know how much other people’s accounts helped me – that’s my motivation for keeping my social media.
Being nonbinary for me is a very fluid space where it’s not a rejection of femininity or masculinity, it’s sort of an embrace of both”
• [On playing Orlando onstage] “This older man’s grandchild had come out as trans and he was trying to understand it. Seeing Orlando shifted his whole perspective; he couldn’t thank me enough. It was wild. It was beautiful”
Rapper A$AP ROCKY – age 35, partner of Rihanna and Bottega Veneta brand ambassador – stars with his sons RZA, 2, and Riot Rose, 9 months in the ad campaign Portraits Of Fatherhood…
“In these sweet snapshots, RZA sits on Rocky’s shoulders, Rocky plants a kiss on Riot’s forehead while holding him high and both boys, in ‘Best Dad’ onesies, play on a toddler-sized piano.
Rocky says: ‘This is me embodying and embracing fatherhood, parenthood, companionship and family while still working on all aspects of my career.
I don’t think there are many people in my culture who advocate for fatherhood and parenthood.
This player persona is very pushed. When you think about a rapper, you think about adolescence, about the single bachelor lifestyle. When you think about A$AP Rocky, you think about a playboy, pretty boy, bras being thrown onstage.
This is about me as one-woman man, a family man. It is about what completes my life now: being present as a partner and a parent. It also shows the sincerity of my place and interactions as a father.’
On Instagram he said of ‘THIS HEARTFELT FATHERS DAY PIECE’:
‘THIS SPECIAL MOMENT CAPTURES THE VULNERABILITY ,LOVE AND INTERACTION BETWEEN MY SONS AND I , IM PROUD 2 BE THE MAN THEY CALL DADDA ❤️. HAPPY FATHERS DAY TO ALL PROUD DADS OUT THERE A$AP’
Rihanna says she loves Rocky ‘differently as a dad. It’s a turn-on. He’s a great, patient, loving father’”
WORDS Rihanna and A$AP Rocky’s 2 Sons Star in Bottega Veneta’s Father’s Day Campaign – See the Photos! (People, 19/6/24)
FROM ACCLAIMED AFRICAN-AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER CARRIE MAE WEEMS (WHO ALSO MADE THE AD’S 1-MINUTE FILM)
“Rocky’s concerns as an African-American man with children profoundly moved me. There’s been a deep lack of honest representation of the Black family. It has been distorted for centuries.
This was a unique opportunity to say something not just positive but truthful – about Rocky’s own experience and how that reflects out to the broader population.
In the wake of all the atrocities committed against Black men – particularly because of their masculinity – Rocky can be seen with his children, in love. To be able to speak that authenticity through him was galvanising”
Singer RIHANNA, age 36 and mum of RZA, age 2, and Riot Rose, 9 months (who she and her partner rapper A$AP Rocky dressed in pink when he was born), says…
“[It makes me feel] really cool to be a boy mom. I get to be as casual and busted as I want to – but it also forces me to embrace the epic things about being a woman and a female and all my femininity. I embrace it so much more now, like I wear pink.
I go between wearing jerseys and like: ‘I’m wearing a dress today! I’m the only one in this house who can do that right now.’
[It highlights what I enjoy about being a woman] because I’m the one that can experience all of that in the house – giving birth to them, carrying them, being a partner with Rocky and running the household and the family. It’s new territory, but it’s empowering”
WORDS Rihanna reveals why having two sons helps her embrace being a woman (Independent, 30/4/24)
MORE FROM RIHANNA
• “Having a house full of boys – I thought I was a girl mom but I’m a boy mom. I love this”
• “I like to dress RZA in things that don’t look like baby clothes. I like to push it. I put him in floral stuff, in hot pink. I love that. I think fluidity in fashion is best. I always shop in the men’s department, you know”
• “I always try to dress my kids like Rocky. Because I always envision dressing a girl, right? We all do as women, like: ‘Oh I’m going to dress her in these cute little things’ but then you get sons and I was like: ‘You know what, I have the biggest hack – their dad’”
• “RZA loves his little brother. Every time he thinks we’re not looking at him, he’ll come over and touch him. If the baby’s crying, he’ll just hold his hands. It hurts him if the baby’s crying. He’ll wake up in the morning just saying: ‘Baby, baby, baby.’ He loves him. It took a while but he got there and I’m proud of him”
• “Hair braiding is a form of protection by our ancestors. It makes us realise where we’ve come from. This is our lost history. I immediately wanted my children to have their hair braided. It’s something in our blood”
• “When you become a mom, there's something that just happens where you feel like you could take on the world – you can do anything”
Comedian AMY POEHLER, age 52 and mum of Archie, 15, and Abel, 13, on voicing the character Joy for Inside Out 2…
“[As a parent] you just want to weirdly crawl in your kid’s head. You’re always like: ‘What’s going on in there?’ And of course it’s usually at the time when they have bouncers outside their door.
Parenthood takes active learning and listening because it keeps changing. The minute you think you’ve figured out the story, it moves on you.
It’s been the most satisfying thing in my life to figure out how to parent well.
Parenting doesn’t end.
I don’t think we – people my age and above – understand how isolating [the last decade] has been for young people.
Anxiety feels like a word that’s been felt a lot. You don’t have to teach people what it means anymore.
I’m inspired by how young people poke at the stuff I thought were core beliefs. If it hurts, it usually means you should ask: ‘Why do I feel defensive?’
[On gender fluidity] The binary is a thing young people have dragged us into learning about. Now I see it everywhere! When we were growing up, the either/or of life felt almost liberating, like safety. I now think it’s too blunt or too basic.
I don’t want to be binary in my thinking. What societal pressures feel specific to boys and girls? Is that even true anymore?
Young people are dismissed, very often marginalised and feel out of control of their lives. It feels like the world is on their shoulders but we also treat them like they, and the stuff they like, are silly and foolish. So are we asking them to fix everything or making fun of them for not being equipped to do so, for not having fought a war? If I was them, I’d be like: ‘You want me to save all of you from all the fucked-up stuff you guys have done but you’re also completely infantilising me.’
The way that generation is curious about their identity is powerful. Don’t stop investigating yourself! The trap we fall into is thinking we’re cooked. It’s not like you turn a certain age and say: ‘I know who I am!’”
WORDS Amy Poehler: “If we want young people to fix everything, why do we make fun of them?” (Guardian, 14/6/24)
MORE FROM POEHLER
“Sometimes my kids disconnect when I’m talking. When I start to give advice, I lose them”
🌈 Actor DAVID TENNANT, age 53 and dad of Ty, 22; Olive, 12; Wilfred, 10; Doris, 8, and Birdie, 4…
“The Doctor Who star recently wore a shirt emblazoned: ‘You will have to go through me' in the colours of the trans flag. The photo was shared by his wife Georgia with others of the family celebrating ‘School Pride’.
Tennant proved an ally when, in 2023, he donned a rainbow badge in non-binary flag colours in support of one of his children who is reportedly non-binary.
He also appeared in a video-campaign message with Dannii Minogue to remind transgender youngsters that they’re loved.
During Pride In London weekend, Tennant wore a ‘You are safe with me’ badge and a shirt that yelled: ‘Leave trans kids alone, you absolute freaks’.
The new picture was shared on X with #ParentGoals #ProtectTransKids #ParentPride”
WORDS Legendary LGBTQ+ ally David Tennant breaks the internet with another amazing trans rights T-shirt (PinkNews, 22/6/24)
🌈 MORE FROM TENNANT
• “Our kids are lovely and being a dad is one of the most life-affirming things that can happen to you. You have to keep working at it if you’re going to be any good at it”
• [From last week’s British LGBT Awards speech] “I’m a little depressed by the fact that acknowledging that everyone has the right to be who they want to be and live their life how they want to live it as long as they’re not hurting anyone else should merit any kind of special award – because it’s common sense, isn’t it? It is human decency. We shouldn’t live in a world where that is worth remarking on.
However until we wake up and [UK politician] Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist anymore – I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up –
I am honoured to receive this”
[His backstage message to trans youth] “You have to be allowed to be yourself – and you are. You are yourself and you must thrive and flourish, and we're all here for you”
• [In 2023] “Do you know what’s making me cheerful at the moment? That Pride month exists and is flourishing when the world seems to be getting, in some corners, worryingly intolerant and weirdly backward.
We can’t take our foot off the gas. We can’t expect that we will always travel in the right direction towards acceptance. We’ve all got to be fighting that fight every day”
Editor DYLAN JONES, age 64 and dad of Edie & Georgia, grew up with a violent father and was raped at age 17…
“Rape isn’t taken seriously enough by many politicians because most victims are women. Male rape is stigmatised, as is female rape, and considered something of an embarrassment.
I should know, as I was raped when I was 17, although I’ve often thought I was lucky in my ability to deal with it.
The important aspect was not the act itself or the circumstances – it was my response. After it happened, I buried it. Having told 1 or 2 friends, I forgot it happened and put it in a box.
I was seriously abused as a child and spent a decade or so putting things into boxes I knew I didn’t need to open. I didn’t talk about [the rape] because I didn’t think my way of dealing with it was particularly helpful to others.
I know enough people who have been raped to know how psychologically destructive it can be. I’ve seen how it has become weaponised – sexually, politically, racially. So what I felt – deliberate indifference – seemed weirdly insensitive, callous.
I never discussed it, as my indifference would have minimised those who had been traumatised. I had made it impossible for the rape to affect my life, but I also knew this wasn’t going to act as any kind of solace to anyone else.
Tragically, we probably all know someone who has suffered some form of sexual abuse. While we can sympathise and empathise, it’s impossible to understand the psychological damage that can linger, often forever.
Rape feels minimised by society: just 2.6% of rape cases result in a charge and over 50% of rape victims drop out before the case starts.
Recently I watched Baby Reindeer on TV but stopped before the male rape scene.
Why can we get so pruriently vocal about the use of rape in entertainment yet treat it as an almost marginal form of assault in real life?
It shouldn’t be any surprise that some rape victims feel the need to minimise their response when the response of society appears to be so indifferent. My indifference was my own decision”
WORDS Dylan Jones: I was raped and I’ve always wondered why we treat it as a marginal crime? (Evening Standard, 11/6/24)
🌈 Actor EMMA D’ARCY, age 31 and House Of The Dragon star, says: “I’m a trans-masc presenting person” and…
“Being a gender-nonconforming person onscreen feels like a real privilege because when I was younger I thought that if I were able to act as my job, it would be quite separate from my identity. I didn’t know it would be possible for those to overlap and be in conversation with each other.
If [my character Princess Rhaenyra is] gender questioning, it’s because she sees men occupy a space that isn’t afforded to her, which makes her reflect on why the rules are applied differently.
Probably I started in a similar place when I was younger in terms of craving the right to occupy space in a way I saw boys and men do.
[Early in my career] I felt I had to present as a woman to find success. It wasn’t sustainable and I stopped pretending. And weirdly at that point I got nominated for Best Actress for the Golden Globes, which is beautifully ironic”
WORDS Emma D’Arcy Says Being a Nonbinary Person on Screen “Feels Like a Real Privilege” (them, 17/6/24)
🌈 MORE FROM D’ARCY
• “Most early, intense adolescent friendships have an erotic edge because it’s an age where we’re trying to work out who we are, what we want and who we want to fuck – all intersecting questions”
• “I’m a non-binary person. I’ve always found myself both pulled and repelled by masculine and feminine identity”
• “I dress quite cartoonish. I’m obviously inspired by David Bowie. Is anyone’s style not inspired by Bowie?
Clothes are armour for me, essential to who I am. Outfits are a tangible way to control how people see you. It’s related to why I dyed my hair bright red: I didn’t really recognise myself – I felt new and it was bliss. I’m chasing that feeling: distance from a person familiar with my reflection”
• “Through the miserable teenage section of one’s life, the arts were a place I felt quite comfortable when I did not feel comfortable in myself”
• [On her character] “I’m not sure she has had the cognitive space to really understand her own desire. The show strives to interrogate the violence inherent to patriarchy. I think it’s really exciting – a fantasy series talking about patriarchy”
• “I wouldn’t have known when I was younger that I’d be out and visible. The value is in creating more space for people to live, so I’m happy to do that job.
We are on a progressive journey. Trans people and gender-nonconforming people will not go away”
Activist JAMEELA JAMIL, age 38, didn't eat a “proper meal” until she was 30…
“Anorexia made me an exhausted, boring, navel-gazing obsessive person in my teens and early 20s.
I took any pill, drink or diet Oprah recommended. Any low-calorie supermodel diet.
[On show business] I can’t think of a worse industry for me, with a history of eating disorders, given that to assimilate you're supposed to be thin unless you want your identity to be the fact that you stand out for not being thin.
I’m so sorry to my body that I jeopardised my future so severely for a beauty standard & to try to fit in with other people.
There’s no talk, almost, about the dangers of not eating enough.
As I got thinner and more congratulated, I had less work ethic and no sex drive for 3 years. I was destroying my organs and bones but always told how clever and disciplined I was.
‘Almost there!’ stylists said as I got closer to size ZERO. At
5ft TEN.
Shooting for Vogue in 2010, I was given size 0 & 00, had to be put in 4 pairs of Spanx and was made to feel embarrassed for being a size 4.
At one shoot I was told I was ‘too fat’ to wear the size 0 clothes and had to hold the dress over me as I stood almost naked in a roomful of strangers. David Bailey literally shouted cheerfully: ‘She’s too fat for the dresses – we'll shoot her naked.’
I don't think I ate for about 3 weeks after that”
WORDS Jameela Jamil reveals her eating disorder ruined her organs and destroyed her bone density as she admits to not eating a proper meal until she was 30 (Daily Mail, 11/6/24)
MORE FROM JAMIL
• [On taking “so many laxatives”] “I’m amazed I still have an asshole. It’s a survivor. I fucked up my kidney, liver, digestive system, heart. And destroyed my bone density”
“Don’t eat for your waistline now – eat for your longevity later”
• [Posting about a 2009 party] “This was a sad day 10 years ago. I didn’t want to go because I was convinced I was ‘too fat’ & would be publicly fat-shamed the next day. I only managed to stay for 10 minutes.
Eating disorders and dysmorphia are so wild. I missed my teens and 20s”
• “We have hypernormalised female suffering in the name of a beauty ideal that constantly changes lol”
🌈 NBA Hall of Famer DWYANE WADE, age 42, and his daughter Zaya, 17 (who came out as trans at age 12), launched Translatable for LGBT+ young people (primarily of colour) to send in photos, poems and “uncurated raw expression” (eg doodles). It’s also an educational resource for parents and families. Dwyane says:
“I’m so very proud of the daughter I’ve had the opportunity to raise. She has been my biggest educator and inspiration and what it means to be true to you.
The question was presented to her: ‘If you have one
thing you want to see change in this community, what would it be?’
For her, it goes right to parents. She wanted to create a space that felt safe for parents and their kids. That’s what Translatable is and it’s her baby”
WORDS Dwyane Wade And Daughter Zaya Launch Translatable In Support Of Trans Youth (Vibe, 23/5/24)
🌈 NBA Hall of Famer DWYANE WADE, age 42, and his daughter Zaya, 17 (who came out as trans at age 12), launched Translatable for LGBT+ young people (primarily of colour) to send in photos, poems and “uncurated raw expression” (eg doodles). It’s also an educational resource for parents and families. Dwyane says:
“I’m so very proud of the daughter I’ve had the opportunity to raise. She has been my biggest educator and inspiration and what it means to be true to you.
The question was presented to her: ‘If you have one
thing you want to see change in this community, what would it be?’
For her, it goes right to parents. She wanted to create a space that felt safe for parents and their kids. That’s what Translatable is and it’s her baby”
WORDS Dwyane Wade And Daughter Zaya Launch Translatable In Support Of Trans Youth (Vibe, 23/5/24)
🌈 MORE FROM DWYANE
• “We’re literally learning from our child. I remember my child being scared to talk to me. I think I’m this dad that’s like: ‘Tell me anything! I’m a cool dad.’ I had to go look myself in the mirror & ask: ‘What is it about my masculinity that has my child afraid?’”
• “People feel that because I have a trans daughter I had this traumatic experience. Zaya has been Zaya from day one. Nothing has changed in how Zaya shows up”
• “You hope as a parent that your kids feel comfortable to communicate with you when they’re confused. But you have to create the environment for that”
• “When our child comes home with a question or issue, it’s our job as parents to listen, to give them the best information & feedback we can. And that doesn’t change because sexuality is involved”
• “I started standing up and having conversations, very uncomfortably. I didn’t know a lot of the verbiage, the information. I was just looking at other parents like: ‘Why are y’all not loving and accepting, regardless?’
We’ve had real tear-jerkers when a father says: ‘Because of you, I’m able to accept what I did not know. I learned to accept my child.’ Like, that right there, man.
The power in ‘seeing is believing’ was way bigger than I could imagine when Zaya came home and told me she was gay at 8 years old”
• “If I just go off of what I read and hear, it’s all bad. But if I go off of what I experience in the world, the conversations I have and the ways I’m able to connect with people, then everything is not bad.
The world’s going to tell us it’s not thriving but this is a community that is THRIVING with acceptance! Thriving in all these areas”
• “What you want to see from us is what love and acceptance look like. You want to understand what you don’t understand, so you want information. These are things we wanted and we put that together in Translatable”
• “It was a process to sit down with our daughter, find out who she is and what she likes and not put something on her. As parents, we put our hopes and fears on our kids. With Zaya, we decided to listen to her. And she’s walking us on the journey.
• “I’m just a parent doing what a good parent should do”
• “The learning never stops”
🌈 LGBT+ advocate ZAYA WADE, age 17, and her dad, ex-basketball star Dwyane Wade, 42, launched Translatable to give LGBTQ+ young people a safe space to express themselves, with resources for parents.
Zaya says: “Beauty standards don’t mean anything. They don’t matter anymore. Beauty is about expressing yourself the way you want to.
Being myself is the best technique. I can be truthful and honest with myself and therefore with other people. That helps better everyone’s connections”
WORDS All About Dwyane Wade’s Daughter Zaya Wade (People, 24/5/24)
🌈 MORE FROM WADE
• “My first experience of magic was laying down my first wig, rocking out a good pump & saying: “I’m here.” I was able to see myself in a way I had always wanted to.
[One thing younger trans kids should know] You’re not alone! As a child at school you’re like: ‘I’m trans and I don’t see many trans people, so I feel isolated. Different.’
But the trans community is forever growing. Seeing their experience is accessible because of social media. Other people can inspire you.
[On supporting a trans friend] Be there – as a shoulder to cry on or a sounding board. Learn about your friend. There are other ways, like researching. A lot of people don’t know what it means to be trans and even if they do, they don’t know what it means to that specific person. There are a lot of new fears they could have. Support them through anything: negativity, transphobic hate, the fear of coming out to people they love”
• “I tend not to interact with social media in an excessive way. Boundaries are super healthy. On Instagram I have a filtered comment section so only the people I know love me can comment, because unnecessary negativity causes stress. Stress gives you acne and wrinkles, and no one likes that!
[On being authentic] Protect your peace. Discovering a part of yourself and having the courage to share it is stressful. You’ve gone through a life-changing experience and you deserve peace.
I’m a microphone. I am my own person, but as a role model I try to use my personal experience to broadcast the positives and negatives in life, because a lot of LGBTQ+ youth go unrecognised in every way.
So much can be done and changed. Gen Z is so special. It’s inspiring to know that we are a new generation. Being able to educate the next generation so they can educate the next one – we can make strides to normalise acceptance through education.
[On a mantra to live by] I’m me and not a single person on this planet can change me”
🌈 Singer MADONNA, age 65, has long been a gay icon…
“The Queen of Pop last week paid tribute on Instagram to the queer community and thanked them for their support. Madge interspersed clips of herself with photos of Pride marches and protests.
She posted: “When Truth or Dare was released in 1991 I had no idea it was going to cause such a stir 🌈🌈🌈 But that could be said of most of the things I do!!
I simply wanted to capture the world. I was living in – and share it with the world.
I am forever grateful to the gay community that has always supported me from day one!!!
When I arrived in New York for the first time in 1979 – They made an awkward girl from Michigan feel like she fit in, like she wasn’t a freak and. That it was OK to be different. I am forever indebted.
In this increasingly chaotic world, we are living in. I will never stop fighting for diversity, inclusiveness and equal rights for all!!!
DON’T HIDE YOUR PRIDE! 🏳️🌈!Let’s celebrate this month and every month ! 🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈”
WORDS Madonna Sends a Reminder to Her LGBTQ+ Fans for Pride Month: “Don’t Hide Your Pride” (Billboard, 6/6/24)
ABOUT MADONNA’s 2023 CELEBRATION TOUR
“Celebration is Madonna’s most radical concert statement in support of the LGBTQ+ community since her 1990 Blond Ambition tour. Every concert has included LGBTQ elements and tributes, but only twice has queer and trans culture been the focus.
At a time when LGBTQ rights are under threat, this show embraces and reassures the gay and trans community and introduces audiences to the world as she sees it.
The concert is post-gender. Women have shaved heads, men long hair; women wear trousers, men dresses; both perform topless and yet there is nothing prurient about seeing a woman’s breasts. In the world Madonna envisions, a person isn’t either/or, they are whatever they want to be.
The dance clubs Madonna emerged from in 1980s New York were palaces of inclusion and freedom. Here, she is surrounded by massive photos of people she loved and lost to Aids. ‘No Fear’ appears on a dancer’s torso & on screens. Pride flags proliferate.
Forty years into her career, her advice remains: have courage & express yourself” 🌈
🌈 Media mogul OPRAH WINFREY, age 70, wearing a sweater with a rainbow on it, said last week on Instagram…
“It was 35 years ago that my younger brother, Jeffrey Lee, died from Aids. He was 29. The year was 1989 and the world was an extremely cruel place, not just for people suffering from Aids, but also for LGBTQ people in general.
I often think if he’d lived, he’d be so amazed at how much the world has changed, that there actually is gay marriage and a Pride month.
How different his life might have been had he lived in a world that saw and appreciated him for who he was rather than attempting to shame him for his sexuality.
I believe every single person has the right to love who they want to love and be the person they most want to be.
My hope for you is that you are living a life that feels authentic to you and that you have the support around you to do so, no matter your sexuality.
Whether or not you’re celebrating Pride this month or always, I wish for you the continued freedom to rise to your truest, highest expression of yourself as a human being.”
In her GLAAD Awards acceptance speech in March she said: “Growing up at the time we did, in the community we did, we didn’t have the language to understand or speak about sexuality and gender in the way we do now.
I didn’t know how deeply my brother internalised the shame he felt about being gay. I wish he could have lived to witness these liberated times and to be here with me tonight.
All the years of the Oprah Show, for me, were about sharing stories that helped people be their authentic selves. I know that is the truest form of what it means to be free, to have personal freedom, to be able to fully be who you are”
WORDS Oprah Winfrey reveals her brother Jeffrey died of AIDS in the 1980s as she shares moving Pride month post: “The world was an extremely cruel place” (Daily Mail, 5/6/24)
🌈 MORE FROM OPRAH
“What I’ve learned over the years of interviewing over 35,000 people one on one is that every single person wants the same thing – and that is the desire and need to feel seen and know that what we say matters and to know that we matter”
Actor RAFE SPALL, age 41 and dad-of-almost-4, wrote an article in April for men’s magazine The Rake…
“The objectification of women is a desperate issue that needs to be addressed. I’m appalled by it. By the way women are described in tabloids, the way their bodies are objectified.
As a male actor, I know there is a great deal of pressure to look a certain way. We fetishise weight loss in men in a way that is not good.
Of course my body’s an object! As an actor, your body is an object. And if you get told that a trainer has been provided for you, you feel an obligation to look as good as you can. For me to have a certain body type requires great sacrifice and calorie deprivation.
If you ever see anyone with their shirt off, they have trained 6 times a week, probably twice a day and had a nutritionist. And it gives people an unrealistic idea of masculinity because it’s actually unobtainable.
Part of what makes everyday life fun and sensual is the act of eating. If I’m supposed to be very thin and muscular, the chances are I’ve dedicated a lot of energy to creating that look. It’s not necessarily healthy. When I look very muscular, it means I’ve done very little eating and enjoying of life”
WORDS Rafe Spall: “Men’s bodies in film give an unrealistic idea of masculinity” (The Independent, 18/5/24)
MORE FROM SPALL
• “I feel bad every time I talked about my weight loss as being positive. It’s a harmful narrative. It’s hurt me. Anyone with any perceived weight issue, it’s gonna make them feel crap. We shouldn’t celebrate it.
People ask me about it, because it’s fascinating, but the shape of your body is meaningless. It hasn’t made me any happier or more unhappy: I’m the same person with the same heart, soul and views. Regardless of my f***ing waist size.
At school I got called fat every day and it was like a small cut on me that I still live with. Traumatic. But from the time of awakening as a human being, to realise that you have a body, you are a body, to have that coincide with everyone realising that your body is horrible… you don’t know that being fat is wrong, that just because you’ve got a little belly it makes you a terrible person. The narrative around weight loss adds to it”
• “Who lays out the parameters of what’s deemed attractive? If you are a young actor, when you take your shirt off, you have to be jacked out. Do you find it attractive? None of the women I know do. Which is good, because I would never have had sex otherwise”
• “I cry every day. Every. Single. Day”
TV presenter ANGELA SCANLON, age 40 and mum of Marnie, 4, and Ruby, 6, says…
“Having red hair was tricky in my teens. I started to believe it wasn’t the type of thing boys liked.
In the 90s and early 00s, there was an unhealthily singular ideal of beauty. Magazines were covered in tanned blondes like Britney. I didn’t fit into that glamazon, sexy archetype.
I struggled with the transition from girlhood into adolescence. Friends were thrilled about breasts appearing and other rites of passage, but I felt the opposite of excited. When I started to develop a new body, it was a confusing, lonely time.
[On being a mum] I realised I had to address the relentless whipcracking I’d been doing internally. I didn’t want to pass that on to my daughter – the little compassion I had for myself and the striving for perfection.
Motherhood helped me re-engage with the childhood version of myself. When I got married I wore black shoes in a nod to my rebellious 6-year-old self. The one who wanted to stand out and be her own person”
WORDS Angela Scanlon looks back: “I thought motherhood would make my career disappear overnight” (Guardian, 8/6/24)
MORE FROM SCANLON
[On having anorexia and bulimia for 15 years from her teens] “It was my coping mechanism. I kept my eating disorder hidden for a long time. It was isolating. I had gone completely in on myself. People around me were kind of aware, but it’s impossible to help somebody if they’re not open to it.
Family occasions are often the most difficult: people’s eyes are on your fork and you’re plotting your exit. The lies are also where the shame comes from. Trying to cover your tracks. It’s a lonely place to live.
Birthing a baby, then watching this little girl revel in her own gorgeous rolls made me realise how detached I was from my body. The one I’d punished, overfed, underfed and didn’t love. The one I’d been abusing for years.
I was also aware of how judgmental I was of other people’s bodies and I didn’t want her to feel she was under scrutiny from anyone. That was a big motivation to look at how I related to my body. I have massive regret for the torture I put it through”
• “I feel it now with my own daughters: there’s a kind of level of control you wish you had over your kids and you realise you don’t”
• “My eating disorder gave me something I could control all day, every day. It seduced me into believing it was me who held the wheel”
• [About being on Strictly Come Dancing in 2023] “I had an 18-month-old baby and my pelvic floor, among other parts of my body, were not ready”
Actor GEORGE MACKAY, age 32 and a dad of 2, on playing an incel in The Beast…
“‘I thought incel was a tech term because they gamed or something – I didn’t realise it meant involuntary celibate.
The fears my character had, being a teenager and being like: ‘What if I kiss someone and it’s bad? What if I’m not good at sex?’ – I identified with those worries.
I had quite a traditional sense of masculinity in terms of the men I admired growing up.’
About his dad working backstage in theatre while his mum, a costume designer, ran their home: ‘Him being away a lot was a physical representation of how hard he worked. I’ve always thought that’s what a man does.’
In 2002 MacKay got his first big job in Peter Pan, filmed in Australia. He’d never seen his dad cry: ‘I was 10, and when he took us to the airport, he wept. I remember being rocked by seeing my dad cry.
My mum says: “The best thing about your dad is how in touch with his feminine side he is.”
That sensitivity is a quality MacKay reveres. In his work he’s been exploring what it means to be a man ‘because my role as a man is changing massively’.
As a new parent, he’s noticed ‘a complete recalibration of what’s positive about masculinity in the last decade’. Strength, leadership and endurance are no longer thought of as a man’s domain, he says. He cites his wife, mother, sister and agent as examples, then worries he’s coming off as patronising.
He’s been wondering why he feels the need to be a certain way as a father: ‘Now that I’ve experienced how sometimes work can be easier than your personal life, I can see my mum was a leader too’”
WORDS “I identified with those worries”: George MacKay on masculinity, misogyny and playing an incel (Guardian, 20/5/24)
MORE FROM MCKAY
• "I had this incredible opening up when my family came about”
• “I had a family 2 years ago. That made me ask tons of questions like: ‘[I’m] bringing wee ones into the world – I want to be solid in myself… in terms of what it is to be a man.’ And it’s like: ‘What makes a person?’
Leaving adolescence and carving your own path, you become responsible for those choices. You’re no longer your parents’ kid or this school’s student. You are you”
Actor RAFE SPALL, age 41 and dad to Lena, 13; Rex, 11; a son, 9, and a child on the way…
“People are always very curious about sex scenes. I’ve actually now said that I don’t want to do them anymore. I’ve done loads. Too many.
[Are they nice to film?] They’re nice if you like 50 blokes watching you pretend to have sex. If that’s your thing!
Also I’ve had my willy out too many times. I couldn’t sleep one night and I counted my sex scenes. I’ve done about 18. I have had my willy out a lot. Too much!
I’ve stopped. I’m not doing it anymore. I’ve got kids in the playground. They are the age when kids talk to them about it.
It is not good. It is wholeheartedly inelegant to get your willy out!
You do a sex scene and this is how I pay my mortgage. This is what I exchange for cash.
A high point of the sex scenes in my life: my number one was probably with David Walliams in Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me (2008).
Part of his bit in life, his shtick, is being flirtatious. And very fluid across the genders. But when it came to the sex scene, he was all scared. I had done so many of them. I w**ked him off, I had to kiss him and we had to do all sorts of things. I had to get in the bath with him.
When you do a sex scene with a woman, I am always acutely aware that you are in a room with predominantly men, so all my concentration goes into making it comfortable for her. But with David it was like: ‘F**king come here, you big dish. Get over there!’”
WORDS Rafe Spall reveals the reason he refuses to film any more sex scenes after appearing more than 18 (Daily Mail, 22/5/24)
MORE FROM SPALL
• “Fatherhood is the hardest, most important thing I’ve done. My generation caters to their kids’ every need. We’ll see how that comes out. I was raised with a lot of love, a feeling that I could achieve anything & a great deal of laughter. I’m trying to pass that on”
• “In Wuthering Heights Heathcliff says: ‘Don’t you love me?’ & Cathy says: ‘I don’t love you. You ARE me. I am you.’ When I think about my kids, I think about that sort of indescribable love”
• “Being a parent changes you & your outlook on the world. You think about your kids, you cry; you see another kid, you cry”
Actor DEMI MOORE, age 61, made headlines for being naked onscreen…
“The Substance by Coralie Fargeat is body horror with a feminist angle. Exploring toxic masculinity and beauty-standards themes, it centres on a drug that turns people into a ‘better version’ of themselves.
Moore stars as a Hollywood star turned TV host who spawns a younger version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley. Some seriously violent and explicit scenes involve them being naked.
Moore said about the ‘level of vulnerability and rawness required to tell the story’: ‘It was a very vulnerable experience and required a lot of sensitivity and conversations.
I felt safe with [Qualley]. We obviously were quite close – naked – and we got a lot of levity at how absurd those situations were.’
Moore said their ‘naked, no-holds-barred bloody fight’ and a scene in which they study their bodies were ‘necessary’, adding: ‘I look for things that push me out of my comfort zone, the opportunity to make a better person and actor. This touched on themes we all face: validation and belonging. Doing the movie takes us to extremes. I came out with greater acceptance of myself’”
WORDS Demi Moore Opened Up About The “Vulnerability And Rawness” Of Shooting Full-Frontal Nudity With Margaret Qualley For Their Forthcoming Horror Movie, The Substance (BuzzFeed, 20/5/24)
MORE FROM DEMI MOORE
• “It just irritates me that people are constantly saying how much I’ve spent on plastic surgery. I have had something done but not on my face. Maybe one day I’ll go under the knife.
The film is about this male perspective of the idealised woman that we as women have bought into, not what somebody’s doing to us.
We are changing. We are living the change”
• [Comparing the nudity to a “powerful exposed moment” in Good Luck To You, Leo Grande (2022) when Emma Thompson “is just looking at herself as she is”] “It’s the smallest part of the film.
We had to do these moments of switching, on this cold tile floor and we’re both nude and laying there. Knowing that we had each other, looking out for each other, it’s impossible not to find the absurdity of it humorous. I said: ‘Thank God we like each other, otherwise this would be really awkward!’”
Writer/director CORALIE FARGEAT, age 48, on her “feminist body-horror film” The Substance, which got a 13-minute standing ovation at Cannes…
“The violence in the movie is a metaphor, Fargeat says, for the violence – emotional & physical – that men inflict on women, and that women inflict on themselves, in their pursuit of unrealistic ideals of beauty.
She shows it ‘in an extreme way because I think this violence is very extreme’.
Fargeat says: ‘I don’t know any woman who doesn’t have an eating disorder or some other thing that they do that does violence to their body’”
WORDS Demi Moore Addresses Extreme Nudity, Violence in Cannes Shocker The Substance (Hollywood Reporter, 20/5/24)
MORE FROM FARGEAT
• [About the #MeToo undercurrent at Cannes] “There is a lot of work to do and it is progressing very slowly, but it’s time that someone has the courage to speak. It’s a little stone in the huge wall we still have to build regarding this issue and I hope my film will be one of the stones. That’s really what I intended to do with it. We need a bigger revolution.
Body horror is the perfect vehicle to express the violence all these women’s issues are about.
I wanted the lead character to go to a woman who incarnates a myth & symbol, as Demi Moore does as an actress”
• [On being inspired to do the film when she was in her 40s] “I had the feeling: ‘Now I’m going to disappear – it’s done.’
When you reflect on this, you say: ‘What leads me to think like that? I’m an educated person, a feminist, and still all those ideas have found a way to penetrate my brain.’
At all ages, women are kind of led to feel we’re not right. When you’re younger, you feel like maybe you’re too fat or your ass isn’t the right way or your boobs aren’t big enough. When you get older, it’s like: oh, you have wrinkles. There is always something commented about your body.
[Hypersexualisation and societal expectations] can lead women to have an extreme violence towards ourselves.
#MeToo is the first little step towards change. It’s 3,000 years of society organised in a certain way and it will be hard to change. I’m really happy the movie is one little stone in the wall for that change’”
Actor KATE WINSLET, age 48, says about daughters…
“‘As a mother of girls, you have to tell them all the time that they are fabulous and beautiful because they are so inundated by negativity all the time.
You have to tell them every single day. And you have to be very careful about how you speak about yourself. You can never say anything negative about yourself. You have to say: “I look fabulous today.” Mario Testino used to say: “Today I’m looking faaabulous!”’
About her kids never having had social media, she says: ‘We’ve been very lucky. At the beginning they’d say: “All our friends’ party invitations are on Facebook.” And I’d say: “You are a kind, interesting person and if they want you to come, they can phone you up.” And they still don’t have it.’
She feels so strongly about the issue that in 2022 she teamed up with her daughter Mia, age 23, to make
I Am Ruth, an improvised drama about a mother struggling to cope with her daughter’s depressive spiral into an online world.
When it won a BAFTA, Winslet used her acceptance speech to call for action from tech companies, saying: ‘Please eradicate harmful content. We don’t want it. We want our children back. We don’t want to lie awake terrified by our children’s mental health. And to any young person who might be listening, who feels they are trapped in an unhealthy world: please ask for help.’
Winslet says: ‘People still come up to me in the street and I can tell it’s going to be about I Am Ruth. It happened here in Cornwall last week: a woman came up to me in a car park & sobbed and she didn’t even need to say it was about that. I just held her. It’s about making people feel understood.’
Her advice for parents struggling with how to stem the tide of smartphones and social media taking over childhood: ‘Get a group of parents from school together, tell them how you’re feeling and you’ll probably find you won’t be the only one thinking it.
I remember saying to the other parents: “Why don’t we all be the meanies together by not letting them have phones?” There was power in numbers’”
WORDS “This Is The First Time I’ve Been Myself.” Kate Winslet On Cornwall, Parenting And The Pressures Of Social Media
(Grazia, 26/4/24)
Actor ZENDAYA, age 27 – of Euphoria, Spider-Man & Dune fame – stars in the R-rated arthouse Challengers movie…
“Zendaya is a teen tennis prodigy lusted after by 2 other players. In one steamy scene, they start kissing her but end up in a makeout session of their own.
Zendaya says: ‘I’ve been playing 16-year-olds since I was 16. So it was interesting playing parts of my life I haven’t experienced yet: I’ve not gotten married or had a child’’
WORDS Challengers Heats Up: How Zendaya’s Star Power and a Sexy Love Triangle Could Give Gen Z Its Next Movie Obsession (Variety, 24/4/24)
MORE FROM ZENDAYA
• “I’ve been asked: ‘What was it like shooting the sex scenes?’ from people who saw the movie and I’m like: ‘What sex scenes?’ Tennis is the sex in the movie. It holds a metaphor for desires, passion, pain, anger, frustration.
I said to my family: ‘Walking into this, if you can’t handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.’ I forewarned them”
• [On her inspiration for the part] “The mothers in my life. I’m definitely inspired by how they tackle and take on motherhood.
I have many nieces & nephews. They’re like my borrowed children: I get to have fun and give them back”
• “My beauty icons are the women in my life. My mom didn’t wear make-up. I don’t think she knew that, to me, it was empowering that she didn’t care. But I was super into it, so I’d go to my grandma’s house and she’d have all the good make-up. I got to see how women are able to navigate within the space of beauty. It’s self-defined”
• “My mom wasn’t into the quintessential glamorous things. She focused most of her energy on being a teacher, but to me she was still extremely beautiful. I wanted to be like her. My grandmother liked getting dressed up and wearing heels. I learned to embrace all of it”
• [On being a Lancôme ambassador at 22] “It’s for a WOMAN Zendaya, finding out what that means. My voice can carry, so I need to be wise about how I use it”
• “I don’t know what it’s like to have had Instagram be a part of my life from the beginning of time. It’s a different beast.
Young people, we all kind of have this pressure: we feel we need to fix everything. It’s just how we choose to push through it”
Former child actor turned chat show host DREW BARRYMORE – age 49 and mum of daughters Frankie, 9, and Olive, 11 – bedazzled her face with glitter to launch #TheFaceof10 campaign from Dove to address the TikTok trend of tweens using anti-ageing skincare products…
“Barrymore, who ‘grew up in a makeup chair’, says in an Insta post young girls are ‘obsessed’ with skincare regimens, adding: ‘You will never anti-age. If you’re lucky, you’ll actually get to age. Young girls don’t need anything anti-ageing.’
Dove sounds the alarm on ‘children & tweens rushing to buy & use anti-ageing skincare products… It’s a gateway to increased anxiety, with nearly 1 in 4 girls aged 10-17 feeling judged about how their skin looks.’
Its Gen A Anti-Aging Talk is on TikTok & elsewhere. Calling out unrealistic standards & harmful imagery on social media, Dove uses the taglines ‘When did Retinol replace face paint?’ and ‘Is it even possible to look 10 years younger at 10?’
Professionals blame the ‘toxic culture’ of the digital environment. Dr Phillippa Diedrichs says: ‘If young girls feel pressure to use skincare products containing highly active anti-ageing ingredients, it could be damaging to their body confidence & self-esteem in the long term, not to mention their skin health.’
In her Insta post Barrymore, whose cool mom cred may carry considerable weight with the target demo, leads with her trademark positivity in saying: ‘We have to figure out messaging that empowers women & lets young girls know they have so much road ahead of them.’
To Gen A she says: ‘You’re already beautiful. Let’s be playful. Let’s never fear getting older – because that is a privilege’”
WORDS Drew Barrymore Calls Aging “A Privilege” in Dove Campaign – includes 2-minute reel (AdWeek, 7/3/24)
MORE FROM BARRYMORE
• “Hollywood’s priority to stay thin, look young & be picture perfect revolts me”
• “I was the anti-workout girl. You turn 40. You have 2 kids & oh wow. I realised I have to do something. It’s almost a mental game. I’m not looking to be bikini-ready. I want to pick up my kids without breaking my back”
• “I used to be a free spirit! Now I wear clothes up to my neck”
Actor KIRSTEN DUNST, age 41, on the “analogue lifestyle” she has with actor Jesse Plemons & their sons Ennis, 5, and James, 2…
“‘We’ve got record players. We’re just not a ‘Siri, play whatever’ household,’ Dunst says. ‘Our kids don’t have iPads. If they want to use an iPad on the plane, it’s Dad’s iPad.
And we’re not phone-at-restaurant kind of people. I’m not raising a kid that can’t have conversations at the table.’
On the character she played in 1996 on ER: ‘I thought I was like a street kid. I didn’t know I was a prostitute. Really?’
Asked about being 11 & getting to kiss Brad Pitt in Interview With The Vampire, Dunst laughs: ‘How about Brad Pitt got to kiss me?’
Of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, an offbeat, sexually charged coming-of-age story, she says: ‘I was very nervous because there’s a sequence where I’m making out with all these boys. Sofia was like: “You don’t have to make out with them. Cover your hair & nestle into their neck. We’ll make it work.”‘
The most stressful part was having to jump on Josh Hartnett. ‘I was like: I’ve never done anything like that – you know what I mean? – in real life’”
WORDS Kirsten Dunst Confronts Civil War Hysteria, Hollywood Pay Gaps and the Media Dividing America: “Everything Is Broken” (Variety, 3/4/24)
MORE FROM DUNST
• “Our youngest turned a year old while I was filming Civil War. It takes a long time for a woman to recover. My body still wasn’t my body when I was making it.
Now I’m either wiping an ass or giving an interview. There’s no in between”
• “A director had me in his office by myself & asked me this inappropriate question. Totally improper. I remember sitting there & knowing something was wrong but with no idea what I should do.
I was only able to avoid that predatory side of the business because my mother was literally always right there”
• “It’s so much worse for young people. Everyone has a smartphone & it’s harder to be yourself & be free. And they’re so worried about their brand, right? Even filtering your face & all that”
• “[I decided] not to change my teeth, not to blow up my lips or whatever it is that everyone wants to look like. I’d rather get old & do good roles. I’m not gonna screw up my face”
🩸Footballer & Lioness KAREN CARNEY, age 36, who is sharing her story to break the taboo around periods, says…
“I had & still have heavy periods, so I had massive anxiety about wearing white. In major tournaments I’d turn to my teammates and ask: ‘Am I alright? Can you check that I haven’t leaked?’
That’s the last thing you want to be thinking when you’re going out onto a pitch in front of thousands of people, about to represent your country.
Even if my mate had gone: ‘Oh no Kaz, you’ve leaked’, could I have walked off or would that have made it more obvious? There’s nothing I could have done, really.
Periods had an impact on me as a footballer. There was a fear of humiliation if you leaked, especially as a teenager. At one of my first England camps we had to do swimming & I wasn’t comfortable.
I struggled to have conversations about my periods with women, so how was I supposed to talk to my male coaches about it?
One of the biggest problems was the lack of education. My mum would say: ‘You’re not the same when you’re due on’ but not in a bad way.
Imagine if I had known more about what it was doing to my body, imagine knowing it was doing more to me from a psychological standpoint.’
In 2022, after the Lionesses won the Euros, Carney was appointed by the government to chair a review into how to guide women’s football into a new era. Less than a year later the Lionesses switched from white to blue shorts due to period concerns in a move praised by current & past players.
Carney says: ‘On runs with pals they might say they’re more tired than usual & we end up discussing periods.
If only 6% of research is conducted by women for women, we need to do something about it for the next generation. My niece is 17 – I want her to be happy, healthy & have the best education. I want to be a role model & make her path as easy as it can be.
We really do need to have these conversations.’
Girls drop out of sport as puberty hits – and for 47.91% of young women aged 16-24, their menstrual cycle & period symptoms stop them from exercising”
🩸WORDS Lioness’s secret fear about wearing her white England kit while on her period (Metro, 7/4/24)
Actor DANNY DYER, age 46, in his Channel 4 documentary Danny Dyer: How To Be A Man is horrified to learn that his son Arty, age 9, is a fan of self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate…
“Dyer says: ‘Tate is the most Googled man on the planet apparently. There’s disciples, little youngsters going: ‘I like what he’s doing – I’m going to do the same thing.’
My little boy who’s 9, he’s really smart, but he’s got a phone now. So the other day his mum said to me: ‘Oh you know he likes Andrew Tate’ & I went: ‘What?’
So I went: ‘You like Andrew Tate?’ He went: ‘Yeah, that is a top G [gangster].’ And I went: ‘Right, OK. But you know he says really fucking stupid things?’ And he went: ‘Yeah, but he’s still a top G.’
It is flowing through every school, even here. It’s integrating into young boys’ souls. And that’s all they need, because it’s a tough time to be a boy. Boys are behind girls at every level – from early years to SATs, GCSEs, A levels, university admissions & degrees.
They’ve got to figure out sex & relationships in the post #MeToo era & that’s a minefield. And they’ve got toxic alpha influences promising them empowerment, making them feel good about themselves.’
About growing up with an abusive father, Dyer says: ‘When Dad fucked off, all of a sudden there was no father figure in the house.’
His younger brother Tony replies: ‘My memories of Dad is [him] just being horrible to Mum & the arguments. So the day he moved out was a day of joy to me.’
Dyer says he was jealous of Tony, who had a female best friend & played with dolls as a child: ‘He’s a lovely fella, a good dad & husband. He would not hurt a fly – must be the least toxic bloke I know.
Me & my brother came out the same womb, had the same upbringing & we’re so different. I’ve got so much respect for him.
Never in a million years would I have had the bollocks to play with dolls. Because it’s not what boys do. So I look back & think: ‘Fucking good for you, bruv’”
WORDS Danny Dyer shocked his son is fan of Andrew Tate (Yahoo Entertainment, 17/4/24)
Singer BILLIE EILISH, age 22, on what she does to decompress…
“‘Sex,’ she says. ‘I talk about sex any time I possibly can. That’s my favourite topic.
My experience as a woman has been that it’s seen in such a weird way. People are so uncomfortable talking about it & weirded out when women are very comfortable in their sexuality & communicative in it. It’s such a frowned-upon thing to talk about. That should change.
TMI, but self-pleasure is an enormous part of my life, a huge help.
People should be jerking it, man. I can’t stress it enough, as somebody with extreme body issues & dysmorphia that I’ve had my entire life.’
Eilish likes to masturbate in front of a mirror: ‘Partly because it’s hot, but it also makes me have such a raw, deep connection to myself & have a love for my body that I have not really ever had.
I got to say, looking in the mirror and thinking: “I look really good right now” is so helpful. You can manufacture the situation to make sure you look good – make the light super dim, be in an outfit or position that’s flattering. I have learned that watching myself feel pleasure has been an extreme help in loving myself & accepting myself, and feeling empowered and comfortable.
I should have a PhD in masturbation.
The song Lunch helped me become who I am, to be real. I wrote some of it before doing anything with a girl & the rest after. I’ve been in love with girls for my whole life, but I just didn’t understand — until, last year, I realised I wanted my face in a vagina. I was never planning on talking about my sexuality – it’s really frustrating to me that it came up.’
After mentioning last autumn that she was attracted to women @BillieEilish posted on Instagram: ‘Thanks Variety… for outing me on a red carpet at 11 a.m. instead of talking about anything else that matters. I like boys & girls leave me alone about it please literally who cares.’
She says: ‘There’s a lot of wanting labels all over the place. Dude, I’ve known people that don’t know their sexuality, or feel comfortable with it, until they’re in their 40s, 50s, 60s. It takes a while to find yourself’”
WORDS Billie Eilish Would Like to Reintroduce Herself (Rolling Stone, 26/4/24)
Actor ANNE HATHAWAY, age 41, star of The Idea Of You – a romance between the divorced mum of a teenager and a boy band heart-throb (Nicholas Galitzine, age 24), rumoured to be modelled on Harry Styles – says…
“For some reason, we talk about coming-of-age stories as being something that happens to you in the earliest parts of your life. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I keep blooming.
I don’t know why we don’t have more stories about human beings blooming at any age. We’re always coming of age, all the time”
WORDS Anne Hathaway Wanted to “Tell the Story of a Woman Blooming” in The Idea of You: “Incredibly Moved” (People, 17/3/24)
MORE FROM HATHAWAY
“I don’t want to be pigeonholed or placed in a box of what type of films I have to be making because of my age, gender and because I won an Oscar. I want to have fun, dammit”
FROM ROBINNE LEE, AUTHOR OF THE IDEA OF YOU
• “It was supposed to be a story about a woman approaching 40, reclaiming her sexuality and rediscovering herself at the point that society writes women off as desirable, viable & whole.
You’re no longer the hot one. You’re not the girlfriend. You’re not even the hot wife now: you’re the mom. It broke my spirit. I was angry”
• “I wanted to write a novel that challenged certain myths: that female sexuality ceases to exist after we hit middle age; that having kids makes us no longer sexually attractive; that women when they should be at their strongest and most prolific become invisible.
I wanted to look at what it is to be a mother and sacrifice your happiness and freedom for your offspring. I wanted to confront society’s codes about what women should or should not do or feel.
I worked hard on crafting a 20-year-old boy-bander who could hold my protagonist’s attention. I needed him to be confident, charming, articulate and witty. Creative, an artist, self-assured and comfortable in his skin. And vulnerable and believable as 20. I created a modernday Mr Darcy. Then I fell in love with him.
[I made my protagonist French because] The French are comfortable with sex and viewing themselves as sexual beings; with nudity and sexuality in the media. They’re at ease with PDA. They’re just more sensual”
Actor KEELEY HAWES, age 48, mother to Myles, 24 – and parent with Succession star Matthew Macfadyen of Maggie, 19, and Ralph, 17 – says about starring in the movie Scoop as Prince Andrew’s private secretary, who arranged his car-crash Newsnight interview…
“It’s very difficult now to take yourself back to that [time before allegations of Andrew sexually assaulting Virginia Giuffre, then 17] and imagine through a totally different lens how that behaviour was viewed.
It’s easy to forget – and I was growing up in the 1980s – but we celebrated those men. Bill Wyman & his teenage bride, Randy Andy in his military suit. They were sexy – it sounds disgusting now to say it, but it was heroic.
I’m not sure those men did think they were doing anything wrong. They were quite open about it. Of course the tide turns and we all go: ‘Actually, that’s really not on’”
WORDS Men like Prince Andrew were once celebrated as “sexy and heroic”, says Keeley Hawes (Independent, 5/4/24)
MORE FROM HAWES
• “It was the publicist’s job to get you into as many things as possible and in the 90s that meant magazines like Loaded.I would turn up to a shoot to publicise a costume drama and there would just be a rail of lingerie. You wouldn’t have a press person; there was no one there but 20-year-old Keeley, who didn’t know how these things worked.
And you’d be put in a hotel room, sometimes with a male photographer, on your own, not even with hair and make-up in the same room. It starts to make my heart slightly. It was deeply uncomfortable. It makes me feel horrendous. I feel for myself.
We are so well protected now; it’s a different world, thank God, but it was just what we were expected to do amd I didn’t really think anything of it”
• “I’m now wrangling with my kids so they make time to see us! It’s nonstop negotiations as parents – it’s just that the negotiations are different”
• “Depression never goes away. I’ve become better equipped at looking after myself. Keeping busy helps, being forced to carry on, because inevitably it will pass. I’m not the poster girl for it, but it is something I experienced.I find it hugely helpful when I read other people’s experiences. It makes you feel less alone”
Royal personage QUEEN CAMILLA, age 76, is patron of domestic-abuse charity SafeLives…
“At Buckingham Palace Camilla hosted 4 SafeLives Changemakers aged 14 to 20 to discuss how #domesticviolence in the home affects young people.
Camilla said: ‘You’re virtually the same age as my granddaughters. I was talking to one the other day and I was suggesting to take sort of pop-up shops into schools. You know, 2 or 3 Changemakers. It would be such a good idea because then they could all come & ask questions.’
Maya, age 20, said: ‘With education secretary GillianKeegan we discussed ways they’re trying to change the curriculum. It’s vital we make changes.
Children need to feel less alone, feel stronger.’
The young advocates want to see kids taught about healthy relationships and coercive control – and relationships & sex education (RSE) taught at a younger age.
‘Children & young people want more from RSE,’ said SafeLives CEO Ellen Miller. ‘And they are being misunderstood by the adults around them.’
She said Camilla is committed ‘to stopping abuse before it starts and before it ruins lives’.
In 2022 Camilla helped host an exhibition with portraits of domestic-violence victims of various genders, ages & backgrounds. The documentary Camilla’s Country Life showed her guest-editing an issue of Country Life magazine in which she drew attention to domestic violence in rural areas.
Camilla said: ‘It’s incredibly moving, so brave of these women, to get up & talk about it when some of them have sat on it for years & years.
People think it doesn’t happen to men, but it jolly well does.
In the countryside, it’s not all rosy. There are darker things happening, especially in areas where they don’t get quite as much attention as they do in big cities’”
WORDS Camilla’s back to business: Queen hosts young pioneers from domestic violence charity SafeLives at Buckingham Palace as she returns from Easter break (Daily Mail, 16/4/24)
MORE FROM CAMILLA
• “It’s being able to spot when somebody is down. It’s difficult when you’re much younger – people don’t really want to admit, do they? I’ve found this in talking to older people as well – by talking about their experiences, it becomes easier”
🩸Actor JESSICA BIEL, age 42 – who, with musician Justin Timberlake, has sons Silas, age 8, and Phineas, 3 – wrote A Kids Book About Periods (out on 7 May) to empower kids, destigmatise menstruation and encourage kids and parents to talk openly…
“‘People don’t talk enough about periods,’ Biel says. ‘I’ve always felt strongly that we need to normalise the discussion.
As a parent, writing this book felt like an organic way to engage kids in the conversation from early on.’
On Instagram she wrote: ‘If we grownups have the confidence to tell the truth about how menstruating bodies work, then we’ll give the kids around us the agency and voice to talk about their own bodies with confidence, now and for the rest of their lives‼️’
Comments flooded in over the book’s avoidance of the word ‘girl’. One said: ‘Only biological females can have periods.’ Another said: ‘Boys need to read this too. Boys grow up to be men and men are generally partners for women. Boys need to understand more about women’s bodies.’
Another said: ‘Why is everyone so up in arms about not using the word girl? I taught my 4-year-old son about periods so he can one day be a supportive partner or friend to someone with a period. Everyone should understand more about periods so girls and women don’t have to feel shame or secrecy.’
On Insta Biel said about getting her period [at age 11]: ‘I was so scared. I locked myself in the bathroom. I was crying hysterically. I called my mom and told her: ‘Something’s wrong.’ I felt like something was wrong with me.
Even though she had prepared me, I wasn’t prepared. I managed to do everything I needed to do that day and still have my period, so pass that around.’
Biel hopes her book will be a conversation starter that encourages body awareness and positivity around menstruating, something she didn’t have when she was young. And for Biel, it’s important to share with her sons.‘Getting your period is actually pretty cool,’ she says”
🩸WORDS “Normalize the discussion around periods”: Jessica Biel announces upcoming children’s book (USA Today, 8/3/24)
Actor Abigail Breslin, age 27 – star of Little Miss Sunshine at age 10 and the 2023 film Miranda’s Victim about the rape that led to creating the Miranda rights – posted on Instagram about being raped by a boyfriend (see below). In 2020 she tweeted when a troll commented on her weight…
“‘Your words are the exact reason a 14-year-old me started throwing up after meals.
Btw, why are you so concerned about a young woman’s physique and why do you feel you have the authority to comment on it? [You could] cause severe damage to someone.’
Promoting body positivity, in 2015 she wrote in a blog: ‘All this stuff about Selena Gomez in her bathing suit is ridiculous.
Why are you commenting on a gorgeous, talented and smart young girl’s body?’”
WORDS Abigail Breslin weight gain: Little Miss Sunshine’s advocacy for body positivity (Sportskeeda, 29/1/24)
MORE FROM BRESLIN
• [On Gomez] “How are young girls supposed to grow up normally and not feel bad about themselves and not develop eating disorders if it’s headline news that a THIN girl may or may not have put on a few pounds and YET still remains THIN? If we taught girls they had more newsworthy qualities than how they fit into a bikini, we’d have a lot more happy girls”
• [On a 2016 Egyptian Gold’s Gym ad of a pear captioned: “This is no shape for a girl”] “Things like this are the reason 9-year-old girls develop eating disorders.
Working out should be something you do for yourself, not cuz a corporation declares your body shape isn’t what girls should look like.
Interesting they had to single out females. Good job for preying on people’s insecurities and perpetuating body image issues!”
• [During Domestic Violence Awareness Month 2022 she posted] “As a DV survivor I felt compelled to write. I was in a very abusive relationship for close to 2 years… I was forced to pretend everything was ok & normal while dealing with intense injuries most people didn’t even see”
• “[On not reporting having been raped] I was in complete shock and denial. I didn’t want to view myself as a ‘victim’, so I suppressed it and pretended it never happened.I was in a relationship with my rapist and feared not being believed”
Actor Cillian Murphy, age 47 – who walked the Oscars red carpet with his artist wife Yvonne McGuinness and sons Malachy, 17, & Aran, 16 – addressed his family at an awards ceremony in January: “Thanks for putting up with me – with the half me, the shadow me & the absent me, the remains of me when I’m doing a film like this or work in general. You’re always there. I love it. So thanks, guys” and said…
“My sons seem better adjusted than I was. More sure of themselves. I’m happy about that. For me, it was something that took a long time to figure out: that it’s all right to be you, all right to be an individual.
They’re really good boys. We have a laugh. We don’t do Dad’s Movie Night, but they like some of my films. They say all my films are really intense”
WORDS Cillian Murphy’s Sons Malachy, 17, and Aran, 16, Make Rare Appearance at 2024 Oscars Before His Best Actor Win (People, 11/3/24)
MORE ON FAMILY FROM MURPHY
• “It’s been the most important thing for me, having those kids and raising them.
[About his wife] To have a really secure, solid base is important. You have to have that safe place. It’s just like an island of comfort and ease”
• “That work-life balance thing is hard. I have an amazing wife – I couldn’t do this without her and her understanding. But it is a struggle. I think it is for any dad whose work takes him away, which it generally does, and which consumes him, which my work does”
• [On how becoming a father made him “a better person”and “aware of what’s important in life”] “I’m a father of 2 teenagers and I once was young as well so I recognise how tricky it is as a young person today in society.
It’s a very complex time growing up – things are changing a lot at a very accelerated rate. We’re all aware of the effect of the internet and life online. It feels to me like lots of kids’ life exists inside of this device.
The idea that empathy would form part of a curriculum is an excellent idea. Young people generally are caring and compassionate”
• [On being a teen] “I had bravado. But deep down…”
• [In his Golden Globes speech] “To my family – I’m the luckiest man and I love you”
• [To his family at the Oscars] “I love you so much”
🌈 “TV and radio presenter Graham Norton, age 60, has opened up about being a role model for LGBT+ fans throughout his career.
The native of Cork felt he ‘didn't have an option’ but to be authentically himself since the start.
An inspiration to young people, he addressed the fans he
has helped navigate being gay in an Ireland that was behind the times.
He says: ‘I meet young people, some of them not even young anymore, and they go: “You really helped me have a conversation with my parents.”
I get that. If you’re sat on the sofa and your mum and dad find my nonsense funny, they’re not as far away as you thought.’
About keeping his vows to husband Jonathan McLeod, whom he wed in 2022, he said that ‘being 60 is old’ so ‘til death do us part seems more achievable now’”
🌈 WORDS Honest chat: Graham Norton opens up about pressure during early career as he became role model for LGBT fans (Irish Sun, 16/2/24)
MORE FROM NORTON
🌈 “Norton paid tribute to ‘all the people who stayed in Ireland to fight for the modern tolerant place it has become’”
🌈 “I moved where the gays were. I went to London. Where nobody knew me so there was none of that scariness and there were gay bars that were just on the street so I could walk in and meet other gay people.I don’t want to be glib about it, because those people who stayed [in Ireland], who went on the marches and did the petitions, are nameless and faceless and I’ll never get to actually thank them, but they did the hard work”
🌈 “Footage has resurfaced of the time Graham Norton opened up about his homosexuality and revealed he thought it was due to being a Protestant in Ireland.
On the Late Late Show in 1999, when he was 34, he said: ‘I thought: “I’m feeling out of step now – it must be the Protestant thing.” It was a revelation when I left Ireland and realised that that wasn’t the Protestant thing at all.’ He said he never ‘really’ knew he was gay until he moved to England”
Actor Kate Winslet, age 48, said over lunch about the weight-loss drug Ozempic: “This sounds terrible. Let’s eat some more things!”…
“In 1997, when Winslet starred in Titanic aged 22, comedian Joan Rivers joked about her sinking the Titanic. In 1998 Winslet tried to stifle conversation about her weight by explaining that she was a heavyset teenager who ‘sensibly lost the weight doing Weight Watchers’.
[About having an eating disorder] ‘I never told anyone about it. Because people around you go: “You look great! You lost weight!” So even the compliment about looking good is connected to weight. That is one thing I will not let people talk about. I pull them up straightaway.
[Filming Titanic] I felt I had to look a certain way or be a certain thing. Because media intrusion was so significant, my life was quite unpleasant.’
In 2022 she discussed being body shamed in the media after Titanic. She was called ‘blubber’ and was advised to settle for ‘fat girl’ roles.
Winslet said: ‘My agent would get calls saying: “How’s her weight?” I kid you not. So it’s heartwarming that this has started to change.’
If she could turn back the clock, she would tell body shamers: ‘Don’t you dare treat me like this. I’m a young woman, my body is changing, I’m figuring it out, I’m deeply insecure, I’m terrified. Don’t make this any harder than it already is. That’s bullying and actually borderline abusive’”
WORDS Kate Winslet calls Ozempic “terrible” as she opens up about past eating disorder (Independent, 9/3/24)
MORE FROM WINSLET
• “In my 20s, people talked about my weight a lot. I was called to comment on my physical self. Then I got this label of being ballsy and outspoken. No: I was just defending myself, still figuring out who the hell I bloody well was! They commented on my size, estimated what I weighed, printed the supposed diet I was on.
[On how this “damaged her confidence”] I didn’t want to go to Hollywood because I thought: ‘God, if this is what they’re saying in England, what will happen when I get there?’It tampers with your evolving impression of what’s beautiful”
• “My daughter Mia, age 23, is very much her own person. Young women now know how to use their voice”
🌈 On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the host showed the Rolling Stone cover of actor Kirsten Stewart, age 33, with her hand in her jockstrap. A self-described “openly gay movie star”, she came out as bisexual in 2017. RollingStone said the cover is “hypersexualised, left of andro and flips the gender script”…
Colbert: It’s a perfectly lovely cover. We were asked by CBS not to show it and I don’t understand why.
I want to say that you look better in a jockstrap than I ever did.
Stewart: It’s a little ironic because I feel like I’ve seen a lot of male pubic hair on the cover of things. A lot of hands in pants.
There’s a certain overt acknowledgment of a female sexuality that has its own volition in a way that’s annoying for people who are sexist and homophobic.
Colbert: I’ve certainly seen more revealing covers on Rolling Stone or Sports Illustrated.
Stewart: It’s not remotely explicit.
Colbert: It also violates public expectations of female sexuality as opposed to how you’re presenting it here.
Stewart: Yes, because female sexuality isn’t supposed to actually want anything but to be had. And that feels like it’s protruding in a way that might be annoying. But fuck you…
WORDS Stephen Colbert Says CBS Asked Him Not to Show Kristen Stewart’s Rolling Stone Cover; Stewart Says “F— You” to the Homophobic Haters (Variety, 12/3/24)
MORE FROM STEWART
🌈 [On her Love Lies Bleeding role] “It is a moving return to form. Kind of like who you are when you’re 11 – physically; the clothes you choose to wear – before you’ve been pummelled by male expectation”
🌈 “I’m just getting back to that 11-year-old. It takes a long period of growing up to get back to who you were when you were a little guy”
🌈 “My sexuality is totally fluid. I’m all over the fucking map and I was [at age 12]. I wanted to be normal and hot, so I was like: ‘I’m going to figure out how to look like a girl and get guys to like me.’ It’s totally a normal story”
🌈 “The violence and shame women internalise then use as triggers for pleasure? We can’t get away from it. To think we know what we want in a way divorced from the patriarchy is impossible. [I’m] Vagina Monologue-ing all over the place…”
🌈 [On female bodies] “The coolest fucking part of us is that we have this ever-present and unclosable opening – we’re walking around with it and we sort of pretend like it’s not there, but it’s our greatest strength”
🌈 Labour minister Jeremy Miles, age 52, who was “on the verge of becoming the UK’s most senior openly gay politician”but was not voted into the post, said of growing up in the 80s…
“I felt very much on the outside, very much that I couldn’t see my place in the world. No part of my life told me it was OK and normal to feel the way I did.
It was a time when the Tory government was finding new ways of being homophobic and oppressing people from LGBT+ communities. So as a young person trying to find your place in the world, that’s a hostile environment.
Life is a process where you’re constantly coming out as gay, in my experience.
Obviously, as you get older, that becomes more familiar and you’re more relaxed and comfortable about it. But it was difficult when I first came out.
I came out at university [at Oxford] to friends, and that was challenging but essentially fine.
Coming out to my parents was a lot more difficult and I think they found it quite difficult, and for a long time. That’s not the case now.
[On how leading the Welsh Labour Party would make him the UK’s most senior gay politician] It would feel like a very significant moment. If you’d been talking to the teenage me, I would never have imagined that to be remotely possible.
I think it’s also important that politics – UK politics and beyond – are representative and more representative than they currently are, because young people need to look at their public leaders and have a sense that they could be doing those roles in life.
And so I think – I hope – that if I do have the honour of leading the party, it will set that ambition for young people today who are gay”
🌈 WORDS “I found it hard coming out, now I might be about to become UK’s most senior gay politician” (Daily Mirror, 11/2/24)
Former tennis star Serena Williams, age 42, posted an Instagram picture of herself in a bikini less than 6 months after her daughter Adira River Ohanian was born…
“Showing her postpartum body some love, the tennis legend is looking blissful while holding her baby girl. In the caption Williams reflects on her body’s journey from winner of tournaments to maker of children:
‘Loving yourself is essential. I find that I have to remind myself of that self-love through all different stages in my life. Right now I love that my body is not picture perfect.
I love that I smell like milk – that milk sustains Adira Ohanian.
I love getting to know a new version of my body. It is a change, but it’s a change that has been well worth it. So start this week, knowing that you are loved and that starts with you.
Ok, now I’m about to go to the gym 🤪’
Williams’s husband, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, commented simply: ‘😍’ They also share daughter Alexis Olympia, age 6.
Williams recently captioned a video of her 2 girls playing: ‘We all work out in this family’”
WORDS Serena Williams Has the Most Relatable Message for Postpartum Moms Who Don’t Feel “Picture Perfect” (Glamour, 12/2/24)
MORE FROM WILLIAMS
• “You really have to learn to accept and love who you are. I’m really happy with my body type and proud of it. I talk about it all the time – how it was uncomfortable for someone like me to be in my body”
• “It was hard for me. People would say I was born a guy, all because of my arms or because I’m strong. I was different to my sister Venus: she was thin and tall and beautiful, and I am strong and muscular – and beautiful, but you know, it was just totally different”
• “I like who I am, I like how I look and I love representing the beautiful dark women out there”
• “How amazing that my body has been able to give me the career I’ve had. I only wish I’d been thankful sooner. It just all comes full circle when I look at my daughter”
• “Oh God, I’ll never be a size 4! Why would I want to do that, and be that? [Gesturing at her bicep] This is me, and this is my weapon and machine”
Prince Harry, age 39, addressed tech bosses in saying:
“‘Stop sending children content you wouldn’t want your own children to see.
We need to get out of this idea that young kids, there’s something wrong with them.
No, it’s the world that we’re allowing to be created around them.’
The Archewell Foundation he started with his wife Meghan Markle, age 42, issued a video of them speaking on World Mental Health Day in October 2023.
Explaining that they’re focusing on what they can do behind the scenes to make social media use ‘safer, better and more positive’, Markle said: ‘People are getting hurt – and people, specifically children, are dying.
When the car was first invented, there wasn’t a seatbelt. People started to get hurt, people started to die. So you started to change the car.
Archewell has been working on a support network for parents [who say social media contributed to their child’s suicide or abuse or] who have children managing serious mental health conditions as a result of their exposure to harmful online content. We met some of the families – it was impossible to not be in tears.
Our kids are really young – 2-and-a-half and 4-and-a-half – but social media is not going away. Everyone now is affected by the online world & social media.’
The death of 14-year-old Molly Russell – who took her life after being bombarded by self-harm and suicide content online – played a major role in pushing the Online Safety Act through the UK Parliament.
Molly’s father Ian Russell, Molly Rose Foundation founder, said: ‘Mark Zuckerberg displayed outright denial about Meta’s role in damaging the health and wellbeing of a generation of teens.
Like Big Tobacco decades before, Big Tech is actively evading the industrial level harm it’s causing young people’”
WORDS Harry and Meghan release video of Duchess telling families of children who have been victims of cyber bullying that “we all just want to feel safe” as couple front campaign calling for “urgent change in the online space” (Daily Mail, 1/3/24)
🌈 Actor Marcia Gay Harden, age 64, said during the 2023 telethon Drag Isn’t Dangerous: “All my children are queer” (Eulala, 25, identifies as nonbinary; Julitta, 19, as fluid and twin Hudson as gay). Harden says she “always will be” an LGBT+ activist…
“[Being on the telethon] I got so much hate mail and so much how I’m ‘grooming my kids’– all this, that and the other. The response from each one of my kids was: ‘Work it, Mom. You’re doing something right if that’s happening.’
I often want to catch my kids, protect them and not let them learn hard lessons because you don’t want them to hurt.
I just have to stand back and go: ‘This is yours right now and it’s painful, but I know you know what to do. You have it in you and you can do it.’
You’d have to ask them how I am as a parent. In the day, they would’ve said ‘strict’. They would all say ‘hands on’ and they would not be wrong.
I want to be involved in their life. I’m not a helicopter mom who’s like: ‘Shouldn’t they get a participation award because they were in the soccer game?’ I don’t like that at all. Earn it, but I want the best for them.
Having a child will literally be the greatest masterclass anybody will ever have in love and the ability to love.
I’ve learned to accept each of my kids for the beauty that they are and dispel expectation. At the end of the day, it’s their life. I want them to be happy in it.
I’ve learned an awful lot about gender nonconformity and about what I was already understanding in my own life, even in high school. My first boyfriend was gay and too afraid to come out until later. Then I was learning about the gay community. Now the kids talk about the queer community and it’s much more expansive, much more gender-nonconforming, much more embracing.
I’m learning on a daily basis about that from all of my kids. They’re all artists on some level, very gifted at what they do. They all have an incredible humanity as well.
I like it when I feel like they’re seen. I’m really supportive of what they want to do and who they are”
🌈 WORDS Marcia Gay Harden Says Her 3 Queer Kids Inspired Her LGBTQ+ Activism: “This Hatred Has to Stop” (People, 17/2/24)
Comedian Amy Schumer, age 42, who was on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last week, said in an Instagram post about comments on her “puffy” face…
“Thank you so much for everyone’s input about my face.
I’ve enjoyed feedback and deliberation about my appearance, as all women do, for almost 20 years.
And you’re right: it is puffier than normal. I have endometriosis – an autoimmune disease that every woman should read about.
There are some medical and hormonal things going on in my world but I’m OK.
Historically women’s bodies have barely been studied medically compared to men. I also believe a woman doesn’t need any excuse for her physical appearance and owes no explanation.
But I wanted to take the opportunity to advocate for self-love and acceptance of the skin you’re in. Like every other women/person some days I feel confident and good as hell and others I want to put a bag over my head.
But I feel strong and beautiful and so proud of this TV show I created. Wrote. Starred in and directed. Maybe just maybe we can focus on that… I hope you enjoy [my show] Life & Beth. Love and solidarity”
WORDS Amy Schumer hits back at comments about her “puffy” face (Evening Standard,17/2/24)
MORE FROM SCHUMER
• [On celebs] “Everyone has been lying saying: ‘Oh smaller portions.’ Like shut the f**k up. You are on Ozempic or one of those things or you got work done. Be real with the people. When I got lipo, I said I got lipo”
• [On getting liposuction] “I’ve never been famous for being hot. But I reached a place where I was tired of looking at myself in the mirror. Everybody on camera is doing this – I just wanted to be real about it”
• “Girls in your 20s, guess what? I looked like you too. Life is coming for you”
• “I’m probably, like, 160lb and I can catch a dick whenever I want. I’m not going to apologise for who I am and I'm going to love the skin I’m in & not strive for some other version of myself”
• “Anyone who has ever been bullied or felt bad about yourself: I am fighting for you, for us”
• “C-section. Hysterectomy. Lipo. This summer is about letting the love in. Trying to be healthy and strong for myself and my family. I want to feel hot too. In my prime. Let’s go”
🌈 Singer Boy George, age 62, says in his book Karma: My Autobiography: “By about age 6, I knew I was gay and so did everyone else. Though I was bullied for being effeminate and pretty, I never really wished I was straight. Of course I knew I had to keep it quiet” and…
“‘In the 1970s there was a sense that I should get on with my gay business over there in the corner and not talk about it.
That was never going to work. As a kid I went to Sunday school in one of Mum’s hats. Her friend said: “Do you know what he’s wearing?”
“I do,” she said defiantly.
When I left the house, Mum said: “Look what he’s wearing.”
Dad would lower his newspaper and say: “Up to him if he wants to get beat up.”
Being the gay) middle child in a London Irish family was less of a big deal than you might think though.’
The family was aware of George’s sexuality but hadn’t discussed it with him: ‘My dad announced my “homosexuality” to my brothers in his van. Turning down the radio, he said: “You know, your brother’s a bit funny.”David chipped in: “Funny peculiar or funny ha ha?”
Richard corrected Dad: “You mean he’s gay.” Dad turned the radio back up.’
George left his turbulent home for a squat in London, where he decorated a wall with numerous X-rated pictures of men.He came back to find a note left by his builder dad Jerry and mum Dinah that read: ‘Nice wallpaper. Love you, son.’
That ended up being an emotional point in their relationship”
WORDS Boy George reveals graphic way his parents discovered he was gay (Metro, 9/1/24)
🌈 MORE FROM GEORGE
• “Violence in marriage was accepted and never discussed. I saw terrible things. One day Mum was under the table screaming up at Dad, who was holding a knife”
• [At a charity event] “Princess Diana broke protocol and approached me. She complimented my outfit: ‘That must have taken forever.’
I said: ‘I didn’t do it myself, love.’ I asked if she would meet Mum and they spent 10 minutes chatting”
• “Dad loved Muhammad Ali. We had a picture of him next to a picture of the Pope.
[At a nightclub I saw Ali] I was, like, full on in total drag. He goes: ‘Are you a girl or boy?’ I said: ‘I’m a boy.’ And he goes: ‘You’re a very pretty boy’”
Actor Julia Roberts, age 56, reminisces…
“‘I waved and people saw I had armpit hair. It was a scandal.’
Though Roberts wasn’t the first star to unveil au naturel armpits in public (Sophia Loren was flouting that beauty norm in the 1950s), she is arguably the most memorable, not least for the amount of discussion – even outrage – that her hirsute appearance at the 1999 London premiere of Notting Hill prompted”
WORDS Julia Roberts Remembers That “Scandalous” Underarm Hair Moment (British Vogue, 13/1/24)
• Roberts on not doing nude scenes during her 35-year “G-rated” film career:
“‘Not criticising others’ choices, but for me to not take off my clothes in a movie or be vulnerable in physical ways is a choice that I guess I make for myself.’
Roberts had a body double for revealing scenes as a prostitute in Pretty Woman (1990) and asked for an explicit sex scene in Duplicity (2009) to be changed, saying: ‘It’s not really what I do, so if you’re going to ask me to do it, you have to expect it to be toned down. You know, as a mum of 3, I feel like that.’
She also once said: ‘I wouldn’t do nudity in films. To act with my clothes on is a performance. To act with my clothes off is a documentary’”
WORDS Julia Roberts says she has made the choice not to do nude scenes (BBC, 12/1/24)
MORE FROM ROBERTS
• “I have girlfriends who were having to juggle being at work and having to go into the bathroom and, you know, get out that breast pump. I sort of went through that with them by proxy. To be allowed the luxury of staying home and being with my family – I had a deep gratitude for that time.But there’s also something to my kids seeing that my creative life is meaningful to me. Going outside of the house and being creative is really important. And it doesn’t take away from my love of home. It’s another level of my life”
• “When you’ve got 3 toddlers in the house, you’re performing all day long with puppet shows and stories. I act around the clock”
• “I am a feminist”
Actor Jamie Dornan, age 41, who hid when reviews for Fifty Shades Of Grey came out (it was “just ridicule almost”), recalls seeing himself on a billboard…
“I was walking through New York and I’d done this Calvin Klein campaign & there’s a massive billboard. Model Natalia Vodianova’s pulled down my jeans and she’s basically taking a bite out of my arse. [Laughs] Or looking like she’s about to.
And I just looked up and was like: ‘Oh my God’ & a woman beside me went: ‘That’s disgusting!’ [Laughs]
And I went: ‘That’s me, that’s actually me. That’s my bum and that’s my face!’
Rugby is a huge love of mine. But there’s also a sort of boys’ club side to it: it’s like you’re this kind of proper man and I’m fine with that. But there was this side of me that wanted to skip about and be a bit more free. The school’s drama studio was the most joyous space ever because everyone left their inhibitions at the door and you could muck about and play.
My dad, a doctor, was in the Royal Victoria Hospital outdoor pool for staff and he saw a beautiful brunette climbing out of the pool.
That was my mother. When, later, they were about to fill in the pool, Dad asked: ‘What’s the craic with the steps? I’d love to keep them.’ So he had the steps propped up against the shed in our garden for years that he first saw my mum on”
WORDS 10 things we learned from Jamie Dornan’s Desert Island Discs (BBC, 29/1/24)
MORE FROM DORNAN
• [On daughters Dulcie, Elva & Alberta] “I want to be someone they feel they can trust & say anything to”
• “Any chance I get to be doing the school run, I’m doing it. I’m not missing out”
• Insta post of him in a dress, wig & heels: “Dressing up with my daughters took a turn. Meet Jenny (with the blue hair). She’s sweet”
• “Being a dad is the best. I feel a healthy & lovely duty to provide for my kids. Making my kids happy is a good thing for my wife & me to be driven by.
Part of me feels like I need to put a cork in it after this. Maybe we’ll just – if my wife’s willing – do it until we can’t anymore. It’s all up to her. I do the fun bit”
• Insta post of his wife & girls: “I’m nothing but a pile of dust without this crew #internationalwomensday”
Actor Christopher Eccleston, age 59, who talks about having anorexia in his 2019 book I Love The Bones Of You: My Father And The Making Of Me, says…
“As a divorced man, a single father, my focus is on spending time with the kids. Watching 2 human beings develop has been fascinating.
My daughter Esme [age 10] is, quite rightly, very quick to highlight misogyny and feminist achievement. It fills my heart with joy.
But what I’ve noticed in the discussions is that my son Albert [age 11] is very quick to trample on his gender. I had to take him aside and say: ‘Son, the people in front of you may have sinned, but you haven’t and you have nothing to be ashamed of.’
Because, as we know from the global picture, if mothers and fathers don’t have these conversations with young boys, they will gravitate towards hate when puberty kicks in. We don’t want our boys to grow up thinking they’re rapists.
The way people have sex is how they communicate.
I did a sex scene with an A-list actress and she implied, in front of the crew, that I was copping a feel. Because she didn’t like me.
I’m fortunate it happened before the Harvey Weinstein stuff came to light so I wasn’t put in the stocks for it. But I’ve never felt more betrayed by a fellow actor. It was an abuse of power.
As a bloke, a young man, you see the majority of people in the crew are male. Then there’s a beautiful woman who’s naked. So unless you’re a complete a***hole, you just continually ask her: ‘Are you comfortable? Is there anything I can do?’
But the intimacy coordinator on True Detective said: ‘I’m here to protect you too.’ I’d not thought about that. You don’t think that maybe somebody’s copping a look at you. You just don’t, not from a working-class northern British background.I was born in ’64, when men were really not the objects of desire as far as I knew”
WORDS Christopher Eccleston on the sex scene that still upsets him: “An A-list actress implied I was copping a feel” (Independent, 20/1/24)
MORE FROM ECCLESTON
“I didn’t want Albert and Esme to ever feel there was anything they couldn’t talk to me about. I couldn’t talk to anyone. I still carry baggage about masculinity and toughness”
Actor Emma Stone, age 35 – who stars as a woman developing emotionally, intellectually and sexually in the black-comedy sci-fi fantasy Poor Things, which “has drawn criticism for its graphic sex and masturbation scenes” – says…
“So much of this was about being true to my character Bella’s experience. Sex is obviously a huge part of her experience and growth, as it is, I think, for most people in life.
But I see it as just one aspect of many: her discovery of food, philosophy, travel, dance. Sex is another aspect.
One things we talked about early on and I thought was extremely important was that Bella is completely free and without shame about her body.
She doesn’t know to be embarrassed by these things or to cover things up or not dive into the full experience when it comes to anything.
So for the camera to sort of shy away from that – or to say: ‘We’ll just cut all of this out because our society functions in a particular way’ – felt like a lack of being honest about who Bella is.
I’m not a person that just wants to be naked all the time, but I am someone who wants to honour the character as fully as I possibly can. That’s part of her journey, so who am I to say that should be shameful?”
WORDS Emma Stone defends glut of sex scenes in provocative Poor Things movie (Evening Standard,19/1/24)
MORE ON POOR THINGS
• “I wanted to play Bella because it felt like acceptance of what it is to be a woman, to be free, scared and brave. She’s understanding what it is to be a member of society. The more autonomous she becomes, the more challenged men seem to be by it” – Stone
• “The film was certified 18 after a scene with 2 boys watching Bella work as a prostitute – their father hires her to teach them how to have sex – was modified.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos said the intimate scenes were a ‘very intrinsic part of the film. We had to be confident and, like the character, have no shame.
With Emma we decided: ‘What position would they be in? What would they do? What’s missing from the experience of sex… that we need to portray to [represent] desire and its idiosyncrasies?’”
• “This is probably one of the most daring female performances in decades” – co-star Mark Ruffalo
Actor Mark Ruffalo, age 56, on starring in Poor Things, which the Daily Star calls a “misogynistic mess” and the Guardian calls funny, filthy, extravagantly peculiar, explosively inventive, steampunk-infused Victoriana & a “carnival of oddness”, a “pervert’s playground full of subliminal smut”, a “wild wild ride” of a film…
“[The sex scenes] are a huge part of the story. It’s a woman growing from very early on through her teens to her fully realised adult.
How many of us in our teens – all we really cared about was sex.
If we can do what the characters Bella and Duncan did in our teens – some of us more lucky than others did get to do that – it’s such an important part of our human development.
There is a lot of gratuitous sex scenes in movies. All of a sudden, you’re in a sex scene like: ‘Why am I…’ and it feels weird as an actor, but you know it’s to get a certain audience in and that’s fine. But this does not smack of that at all”
WORDS Mark Ruffalo defends Poor Things sex scenes (Digital Spy, 9/1/24)
MORE FROM RUFFALO
• [On appearing naked in the film] “I was like: ‘Do I have to?’ All I can hear is: ‘Nobody wants to see your old ass anymore. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing movies like that anymore.’ [The nudity is] my least favourite part of it, but I also saw it as an extension of the physical comedy that we were finding. So it was just another way to tell the story”
• “I didn’t know if I could pull this off. I’ve never done anything like Poor Things. So, like, the sex scenes: ‘Am I too old to be doing that kind of stuff? Does anyone want to see that?’I feel like we’re in this prudish time for films.
Sexuality is so deeply connected to the psychology of a character. And it should be explored in that sense too”
• “What’s so remarkable about this movie, it’s… shaking off cultural oppression in a lot of ways”
• In 2015 Ruffalo posed shirtless on Instagram, posting: “Men get breast cancer too. I’m supporting @One4TheBoys #InTheNipOfTime campaign”
Actor Gillian Anderson, age 55, “made a bold fashion choice for the Golden Globes with a dress subtly embroidered with vaginas”. Vulvas actually…
“Fans zooming in on her gown noticed it was covered in female-anatomy motifs.
Asked why, Anderson said: ‘Oh for so many reasons. It’s brand appropriate.
Yonis [Sanskrit word for wombs or vaginas] – there are so many yonis on my dress. It took 3.5 hours per yoni to embroider. So it was about 150 hours of embroidering.
Since my Instagram presence has been highlighting yonis since Sex Education landed on Netflix and with the mantra of my brand, G Spot, being to prioritise pleasure, I wanted to bring this element into the design.’
Anderson posted a photo of herself, quipping: ‘Sometimes you just need a sausage to go with your yoni dress.’
The designer, Gabriela Hearst, declared the look ‘vulvaliciously chic’.
Anderson explained that her ‘alternative wellness brand’ G Spot was a response to the restrictive diets she was made to follow in her 20s and 30s. When she was in her 40s the diets made her feel like saying: ‘Don’t f***ing tell me what I should and shouldn’t be consuming; I can do whatever I want.’
Anderson has compiled a book based on women’s sexual fantasies: ‘The book and a few other things have the same messaging in terms of pleasure and empowerment, and being honest with oneself about what one wants and what feels good.’
She had written: ‘I want women across the world, and all of you who identify intrinsically as women now… to tell me what you think about when you think about sex. When you’re having it by yourself or with a partner, or with more than one. Fantasies, frustrations, explorations, the forbidden, childhood, sounds, fetishes, guilt, insatiability. 50 years on [after Nancy Friday’s 1973 book My Secret Garden], the boundaries have been erased, no more so than in our own sexuality… Are women still the silent sex?’
After playing therapist Jean Milburn in Sex Education, she said: ‘I’ve been sent more vibrators than I ever have, which isn’t a bad thing!’”
WORDS Gillian Anderson explains why she wore a Golden Globes dress covered with vaginas as fans declare she “stole the show” (Daily Mail, 9/1/24)
Two Calvin Klein ads are making headlines. Compare and contrast…
1) “A Calvin Klein ad featuring UK musician FKA twigs, age 36, was banned in the UK by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) this month for depicting her as a ‘stereotypical sexual object’. It had received 2 complaints.
twigs wrote on Instagram: ‘I do not see the stereotypical sexual object that they have labelled me. I see a beautiful strong woman of colour whose incredible body has overcome more pain than you can imagine.
In light of reviewing other campaigns, past and current, of this nature, I can’t help but feel there are some double standards here.’
Citing Josephine Baker, Eartha Kitt and Grace Jones as inspirational women ‘who broke down barriers of what it looks like to be empowered and harness a unique embodied sensuality’, the artist says she is proud of her physicality and ‘will not have her narrative’ changed.
Calvin Klein said the ads were similar to the posters it has run in the UK for years which did not overly sexualise women and that the women in the ads had approved the images”
WORDS FKA twigs Calls Out “Double Standards” After Her Calvin Klein Advert Is Banned in the UK (Time, 11/1/24)
FROM NYOME NICHOLAS-WILLIAMS IN GLAMOUR
“twigs was policed & dubbed ‘offensive’. Black & Brown women’s bodies are being observed, studied & ridiculed for simply existing”
2) About the new ad with actor Jeremy Allen White, age 32 – which in 48 hours generated $12.7 million in media exposure for Calvin Klein and has been jokingly called a “national landmark” – White said…
• “I was used to running around in front of large groups of people in my underwear because of the film The Iron Claw, so maybe there was some mental and emotional prep from that job.
I didn’t see this in my future necessarily. Who grows up thinking: ‘Yeah, I’ll be in a Calvin Klein campaign?’
In my head, I was just like: ‘I can’t see myself on a billboard. I shouldn’t be here.’ Just real imposter syndrome”
• “It is bizarre doing Calvin Klein and now it is even more bizarre having it come out, but everything feels OK for now”
WORDS How Jeremy Allen White prepped for his Calvin Klein underwear campaign (GQ, 4/1/24) & Unpicking The Politics Of The Male Thirst Trap (Grazia, 9/1/24)
Actor Jacob Elordi, age 26, who stars in Saltburn, on the infamous bathtub scene **SPOILER ALERT**
“In Saltburn, Felix (Jacob Elordi) pleasures himself in the bath before hopping out after finishing washing and his moment of pleasure, with Oliver (Barry Keoghan) watching on.
Moments later, Oliver dives into the bathtub and slurps up the water and Felix’s bodily fluids.
Elordi says: ‘I was like: “Thank God, it’s mine.” I was very proud.
I was very proud to have Barry Keoghan guzzling it like that.’
I was just really excited when I read that scene because you don’t really see things like that in mainstream movies.
So it’s great that director Emerald Fennell was allowed to kind of push those boundaries and expose people like that.
At a screening in Brisbane, it was unbelievable because everybody was engaged and sort of gasping and yelling at the screen.
I haven’t been in a movie like that in a really long time”
WORDS Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi admits being “excited” over infamous Barry Keoghan bathtub scene (Daily Mirror, 7/1/24)
ON JACOB ELORDI’S BATHWATER MERCH
1) A cocktail inspired by the scene contains cream coconut, pineapple juice, rum and lime juice
2) Smelling a Jacob Elordi’s Bathwater candle (sold in Vanilla, Comfort Spice or Sea Breeze), producer MargotRobbie said: “So accurate”
MORE FROM ELORDI
• “You learn quickly that what people take away from movies is your stature and figure. You have all sorts of aged people around the world only talking about what you look like.
[On male objectification] I don’t think it’s really a conversation that people have in regards to men. It doesn’t keep me up at night but it’s definitely frustrating. You’ll go to a shoot and you’ll be getting changed & someone’s like: ‘Oooaaah, would you look?’ Can you imagine if I said to a woman: ‘Daaaaamn, look at your waist!’? Like, see you later. I would never do that.
It’s a slippery slope to put all your value into the vanity of what your body looks like. Your body is going to deteriorate”
• [On starring in The Kissing Booth at 23] “I got thrown into a world where everyone wanted to talk about my body. It really fucking bothered me. I don’t identify with that whatsoever. I was trying to prove myself & be known as an actor”
• “I would just rip my shirt off and have headphones on, playing Rage Against the Machine. I was trying to understand this mentality of what it is to be in the gym and look at yourself in the mirror and be like: ‘F**k I look good’”
Actor Barry Keoghan, age 31, from Dublin, grew up without a dad, lost his mum to a heroin overdose, was in foster care with his brother and finally found himself, first in a boxing ring then on a film set… **SPOILER ALERT**
[On his character during the infamous bathtub scene in Saltburn] “Oliver was submitting to his obsession and trying to figure out what it is he’s chasing.
When he gets down there, he’s just confused, helpless & sick, you know, to do that. Ugh!
[On the grave scene] I asked for a closed set to see what I’d do as Oliver when ‘Action!’ happened & where I went. To me, he went to a place of being totally heartbroken, lost and confused.
[On the dance scene] I think it was gorgeous to look at a figure like that, roaming that manor dripping in money and paintings from the 1700s and to move so freely.
It’s not a normal thing to see.
But it’s a normal thing to do, because I know we all do it at home. Every single one of us – we all dance around naked.
So it’s probably the most relatable scene in the movie to everyone watching”
WORDS Barry Keoghan Explains Why 1 Of Saltburn’s Most Talked-About Scenes Is Also Its “Most Relatable” (HuffPost, 10/1/24)
MORE FROM KEOGHAN
• [On dancing naked] “It’s full confidence in ‘I can strip to my barest & waltz around because this [place] is mine.’The initial thing was about me having no clothes on. I’m a bit ‘ehhh’. But after take one, I was ready to go. I was like: ‘Let’s go again.’ Yeah, it was fun”
• “I’m really flirtin’ with Jacob. We were constantly close. It ain’t just for the cameras & premieres. Me & Jacob – he’s like a brother. When you’re comfortable with someone, you can be as close as you want. When I’m comfortable, I’m COMFY. I’m comfortable with Jacob. Messin’ about. Havin’ a laugh. We’re bein’ lads.We did a movie where we had to kiss, man. Look at the scenes we’ve done. You have to be comfortable with yourself”
• [On his son, Brando, 18 months old] “I feel a responsibility, enormous pressure, which is good. And I can’t get the little boy off my mind.
It’s beautiful. It’s crazy, but when he looks at you, you feel like the most important person in the world. That’s the effect he has on me”
Actor Jodie Foster, age 61, says her sons Kit and Charles, who are in their 20s, had “an early confusion over how to be male”, adding…
“My two don’t like sports. They like to watch movies and sit at home, and they’re really into their female friends. They’re super feminist.
And there was a moment with my older one when he was in high school, when, because he was raised by 2 women – 3 women [her, her partner Alexandra Hedison and their mother Cydney Bernard] – it was like he was trying to figure out what it was to be a boy.
And he watched television and came to the conclusion: ‘Oh, I just need to be an asshole. I understand! I need to be shitty to women and act like I’m a fucker.’
And I was like: ‘No! That’s not what it is to be a man! That’s what our culture has been selling you for all this time.’
[The phase lasted 6 months. Did she let it play out?] Yes and no. I was like: ‘You won’t be talking to me like that.’
[On ‘achieving a washboard stomach’ by working out for 6 months to play a swimming coach in the film Nyad] I’ve been waiting to be objectified my entire life so I’m very happy that people have started talking about my body parts.
[On actor Bella Ramsey, age 20 – who told British Vogue: ‘I’m not 100% straight’ – introducing her at the Elle magazine Women In Hollywood event] I said: ‘I want you to introduce me at this thing.’ All the attendees are wearing heels and eyelashes. There are other ways of being a woman and it’s really important for people to see that. Bella was wearing the most perfect suit, beautifully tailored, and a middle parting and no makeup.’
[Could she have looked like that when she was young?] No, because we weren’t free. Because we didn’t have freedom. And hopefully that’s what the vector of authenticity that’s happening offers – the possibility of real freedom.I would say: I did the best I could for my generation. I was very busy understanding where I fitted in & where I wanted to be in terms of feminism. But my lens wasn’t wide enough. I lived in an incredibly segregated world”
WORDS “There are different ways of being a woman”: Jodie Foster on beauty, bravery and raising feminist sons (Guardian, 6/1/24)